1. What is REALNEO?

1.1. What is a "Virtual Community"?

"Virtual community" is a term used to describe a wide variety of computer-mediated communication, particularly long-term, textually mediated conversations among large groups. Such groups are comprised of people who may or may not meet one another face-to-face, and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer networks and a variety of web formats, such as blogs and bulletin boards.

The range of available activities is immense. People chat, collaborate, exchange physical and intellectual property, and bring new information to their respective groups. They do everything people do when they meet face-to-face. Electronic interactions in which people don't know each other provide opportunities for new kinds of communities.

Existing technologies provide for the creation of virtually communities structured to serve a wide array of social, business, and professional groups in a secure computing. Each group is moderated by a group leader who can regulate group membership, decide on the collaboration tools available to group members, and moderate postings and discussions among group members.

1.2. REALNEO: Why is it needed?

Case Weatherhead School of Management organizational behavior professor David Cooperrider, developer of the appreciative inquiry management theory, thus sums up the need for REALNEO as follows.

• For better human cooperation, the most advanced economic development organizations and leaders in Northeast Ohio use new forms of global interaction. REI's Ed Morrison publishes a globally read blog, http://www.edpro.blogspot.com/. REI has a wiki, rooted at http://www.smartmeetingdesign.com/rei/. A group of area wind power industry proponents have a blog on that subject at http://makingchange.typepad.com/neowind/. Thus, there is clear evidence that smart local economic development leaders consider social networking necessary. The examples above illustrate three different solution providers.

• In Northeast Ohio there are approximately 600+ economic development related organizations comprised of hundreds of thousands of stakeholders. Thus, there exist 1,000s of social, business, and project networks that conduct 1,000s of related meetings, seminars and lectures per year. Most of these organizations rely on virtualized management and content, and none of them interact or leverage any synergies.

• By organizing all the related contacts, content, communications, and schedules of the Northeast Ohio organizations in one virtual space, we will be obtain the ability to leverage economies of scale and synergies, develop a centralized, optimized site for all, while providing control for every group over their section of the virtual community.

• A virtual community environment will result that will provide a strong visibility for all participating groups along with a unique, powerful environment for collaboration among the members of these groups in a secure environment.

1.3. Don't we already have virtual communities?

A number of social, business, and project networks currently maintain web sites that serve their membership. The tools available for online networking, the dissemination of news and articles, the exchange of information among subject matter experts, event planning, and ad hoc collaboration vary widely among these groups. The costs associated with developing an effective web presence significantly inhibit the capabilities that many of these groups are able to provide to their membership.

Thus, while many area network groups have established a web presence, they are often limited in the collaborative services they can offer their memberships due to fiscal constraints. They are further limited in their ability to interact or leverage synergy with other groups. For example, the co-hosting of events can reduce the cost of sponsorship substantially for participating organizations while significantly increasing attendance.

1.4. What is different about REALNEO?

REALNEO is developing a uniquely world-class open source content management system, by adding to the Drupal project and helping drive and fund further optimal development.

2. The Drupal Project

Drupal is the product of an open source project devoted to the development of a dynamic web site platform. A community of developers works to constantly update and revise the project. This platform allows an individual or community of users to publish, manage, and organize a variety of content and information. This ability to manage information makes Drupal a content management system (CMS). Users utilize Drupal's browser-based interface to communicate openly with one another. This enhances the revision process of documents or projects on the site because of the centralized location.

Drupal is designed to be flexible and powerful enough to meet a broad range of web technology needs, from simple informational postings to large organizational sites and collaborative projects. The focus of the Drupal Project is on the development of a platform providing virtual communities and collaboration.

2.1. Drupal Mission

"Building on and realizing relevant standards and open source technologies, Drupal supports and enhances the potential of the Internet as a medium where diverse and geographically-separated individuals and groups can come together and collectively produce and share rich bases of information and expression."

2.2. Drupal's Collaborative Capabilities

User Management: One of the most vital functions, of any content management system, is its ability to manage its users. Drupal allows individual users to ["register" Drupal user registration and personal account information] and authenticate locally or by using an external authentication source. By requiring users to register, Drupal allows for ["private messaging" Private Messaging & Notification] and other forms of private communication with other registered users.REALNEO Virtual Community.

Weblog: One commonly used feature on Drupal is the weblog. A single installation can be configured to create a website with multiple individual weblogs. Weblogs allow communication between members of the community. As opposed to e-mail or private notification, weblogs allow the entire community to view and respond with their own thoughts, ["comments" Creating and editing nodes and comments], and ideas. Drupal employs Blogger API support, content syndication, ["a news aggregator" Drupal News Aggregator and RSS Documentation], and permalinks to assist in managing a weblog.

Discussion Based Community: The primary advantage of Drupal comes from its ability to allow users and members of the community to reply to weblogs or posts made by other users. This ability can also be expanded to include comments and possible revisions for information stored in the content management system. By allowing users to utilize the Forums Module to create discussion boards, Drupal empowers individuals and gives them a unique voice.

Another advantage, to having an online discussion based community, is that the postings allow for the whole revision process of projects and information to be shown. This means that users can become involved in a project at any given time throughout the revision process. The environment remains controlled by administrator(s) so that comments and updates are constructive and relevant to the task at hand. Administrators also have the ability to let the community moderate the content management system.

Collaboration: Enabling collaboration is a primary feature of Drupal. Many features and functions of the Drupal are focused on user and community interaction towards a common goal. Through the use of the weblogs and the discussion based community, information and thoughts from individual users are focused on single or multiple projects. This input helps to dramatically improve the quality of any collaborative project. By providing a centralized online location, Drupal breaks down geographical barriers between people.

2.3. Community News Portal

Drupal can be configured as a Community News Portal where the stories are provided by the audience. Incoming stories are automatically voted upon by the audience and the best stories bubble up to the home page. Bad stories and comments are automatically hidden after enough negative votes.

2.4. News Aggregator

Thousands of web sites, especially news sites, trade publications, and weblogs, syndicate their most recent site content for others to display. The syndicated content always includes titles, also known as headlines, for the newest published stories. Each headline acts as a direct link to the stories on the remote site.

Drupal has a news aggregator built in as a standard feature. With it, you can subscribe to feeds from other sites and display their content for your site users. You can define categories in the news aggregator to enable the assignment of categories to news stories. This provides users with the option of viewing news stories based on category or news source.

2.5. Drupal Security

Drupal has a strong focus on security. Drupal allows the administrator to control the flow of information into the content management system through the use of content approval. User accountability is also taken into consideration by tracking user login history and creating an audit trail. This results in a moderated public forum that encourages the free exchange of ideas while maintaining user privacy and accountability.

3. REALNEO: Professional Benefits

3.1. Multiple Modes of Content and Contact

The Drupal site content hierarchy is based on nodes. A node begins as content on a page, which can take on various forms such as books pages, articles, forums, and personal blogs. Drupal sites have an option that allows users to be emailed when new comments are posted to a topic that interests them. Other administrative options allow users to view comments, have total control over comments, have the option to rate comments, and post comments without approval. The permissions that you have will vary depending on the Drupal site and what the administrator chooses to do.

3.2. Blogs

Drupal's blog module allows all registered users to maintain a personal weblog on site. Blogs can be used as an online journal or diary, where users post daily thoughts, poetry, valuable experiences, writing experiments, critics on current facts, fresh insights, and chronicles for public consumption. From a more practical standpoint, blogs can be seen as a means of personal knowledge publishing, a place for researchers or enthusiasts to build and share knowledge about their interests. In project oriented sites, Blogs can serve as a workspace for project members to post ideas for commenting by others in a group.

3.3. Collaborative Book or Documentation Writing

"Books" organize Drupal site content into a nested hierarchical structure. It is particularly good for manuals, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and the like, allowing you to have chapters, sections, etc.

A book is simply a collection of nodes that have been linked together. These nodes are usually of type book page, but you can insert nodes of any type into a book outline. Every node in the book has a parent node which "contains" it. At any given level in the hierarchy, a book can contain many nodes. All these sibling nodes are sorted according to the weight that you give them.

Book pages contain a log message field which helps your users understand the motivation behind an edit of a book page. Each edited version of a book page is stored as a new revision of a node. This capability makes it easy to revert to an old version of a page, should that be desirable.

Like other node types, book submissions and edits may be subject to moderation, depending on your configuration. Similarly, books use permissions to determine who may read and write to them. Only administrators are allowed to create new books.

4. Successful Drupal-Based Virtual Communities

MacMegasite - Macintosh news from a developer's point of view. The latest Macintosh news, tips, and rumors from a developer's point of view.

burngreave.net - Developing Community IT tools. Ensuring that all the residents of Burngreave benefit from the opportunities ICT brings.

Arizona Legislative Watch - Helping citizens shape Arizona legislative policy. Arizona Legislative Watch (AZLW) is an educational, privately funded organization, which provides information regarding the legislative activity of Arizona elected representatives. AZLW also educates citizens about important issues within the framework of a strong committment to God, Family, and Country. We hold intellectual honesty to be the most important indicator of that committment.

Carmel Center Indiana - Your community connection to the internet. Carmel Center is central Indiana's connection to the internet. Our community begins in Carmel Indiana and extends throughout the greater Indianapolis area and all of Indiana. Our extended community includes Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and the rest of the world.

Synfibers - Synthetic Fibers: IT Consulting, Web Design & Hosting. Synfibers.com provides high quality, low-cost web design and hosting services, including hosting of MySQL databases and PHP scripts. We currently host several sites that use version 4.3.2 of the Drupal content management system.