Transition Network: Project Sharing Engine

Another Transition Network project, and funded by the Nominet Trust... We're currently in the design phase of an ambitious project to investigate the idea that sharing an interface to a website would allow the sharing of knowledge and resources around the web. This is the interactive 'son of' the existing News Sharing Engine.

The project will create two distinct types of 'widget' that participating webmasters will place their website, which all be for Transition Initiatives to begin with. Once up, the widgets allow visitors to those sites to see projects near to the initiative, and indeed add ones they're involved with. There are therefore two types of widgets:

Display widget — with a few variants, this show lists of projects near to the Transition movement on their website. There will be small (for sidebars), medium and large widgets, with increasnig functionality and information displayed. The most basic will be a clean theme and a custom-filtered view of the Transtion Network Projects Directory, while the larger ones will expose filtering and other options to the user, including a quick overview of the project and its location. The largest widget will likely include a map display, too.
Entry widget — allows people visiting the website to add their projects to the main Projects Directory through a clean, simple interface.

Infrastructure-wise, we're still deciding whether project this will be an extension to the existing Drupal 6 site, or a stand alone system, or a hybrid thereof. The alpha version is scheduled to be out in a couple of months this year.

More here soon. You can find out more about this project from Ed Mitchell's PSE-tagged blog posts on the Transition Network site.