Wednesday, June 27, 2007

newschallenge.org Web developer Benjamin Melancon wants to help site visitors frame context more easily.

Benjamin Melançon believes that today's active Internet users can play an integral role in drawing connections and frame context in a site. He recently won a $15,000 Knight News Challenge grant to develop a tool that would let visitors to a site quickly and easily connect any pieces of content there (news, idea, group, event) that they consider related.

Melançon is the creative mind and information architect behind sites like Agaric Design Collective, People Who Give a Damn!, and his personal blog.

He's also no stranger to content management systems. All of his sites are built on Drupal, the popular open-source content management system developed by volunteer programmers from around the world. In fact, Drupal has become such a ubiquitous tool for online social activists that Web designer Jeff Robbins thinks it might just save the world.

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Now it's time for Melançon to give back to the Drupal community, His grant will fund the development of a Drupal plugin module, Related Items. Similar Drupal modules, which link articles based on keywords, already exist -- but Melançon's proposed module would let users and readers make the connections themselves.

"Working with other Drupal modules," he writes, "Related Items could connect national or regional content to local groups, actions, and events based on users' locations ...One person making a connection can prove valuable to a whole community."

Though Melançon is a part-time developer of Drupal, he decided to use a portion of his Knight News Challenge blogger grant to hire more experienced Drupal programmers to write the code for the module. Once developed, he'll volunteer his time to fix bugs and update the module so that it is compatible with future versions of Drupal. He'll also blog about the process.

Would the readers of Drupal-powered sites like NowPublic, H2otown, and Bluffton Today really take the time to connect articles about, say, strawberry ice-cream at Lizzy's and Christina's specialty ice-cream? Thanks to Melançon's efforts, we may get to find out.

Guest contributor David Sasaki is director of outreach for Global Voices Online.

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