Small Pieces Loosely Joined

The general thinking in this approach is to use different software / systems which each focus well on one particular medium or task, and link them together. This benefits from the great diversity in the larger software world. Some starting suggestions if we were to make our own mashup (please add your input):

Wiki: OddMuse (because Lion and Brandon are familiar with it)

Blogs: WordPress, or maybe blosxom

Forums/mailing lists: ?? [maybe phpBB --HD, AC]

(Not my area of expertise - please make suggestions. My only input comes from knowing that some people prefer e-mail and some prefer web, so hopefully something that lets people participate in either way - replies to e-mails appear on the web, and replies on the web go out as e-mail. E-mail users will probably want a way subscribe to everything or only selected conversations. And of course i'd prefer something free/open source. --John Abbe)

Photos: Flickr

Bookmarks: del.icio.us 

Personal information and relationships: FOAF

What other functionality are we using, or do we want?

Stitching these together may seem like a lot of effort compared to using an all-in-one system such as Drupal, but as we are seeing there is a lot of fine tuning involved in setting it up, and features that already exist in the specialized systems we will apparently have to code for ourselves (or wait for someone else to do it). Also, we may find that we want our site to work with other systems at some point anyway, and the expertise we gain by doing this sort of work among our own systems will make that much easier.

Finally, equally important to the question of how much work an approach would take is how much interest/energy there is to different kinds of work.

In any case this is not an all or nothing issue. Some examples of what the small pieces loosely joined approach would look like while still using Drupal:

• Pull in people's relevant posts automatically from their own blogs, rather than asking them to post twice (which they often just won't do). And contribute that code back to Drupal.
• Consider other systems/software when we're adding a new function - e.g., Flickr for photos.
• Make a custom front page for the whole site using RSS feeds from the various Drupal modules (forums, blogs, wiki).
• Put a feed of del.icio.us links tagged "evolutionarysalon" in the sidebar. (and more of us using del.icio.us to bookmark and tag relevant links)

The name of this page is stolen from David Weinberger's book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, which is about the web and other successful computer/net technology. This way of working actually far predates the World Wide Web, going back to much of the way that Unix and Internet were and are developed.