This weekend Design For Drupal Boston promises to be the biggest Drupal event to hit New England since the 2008 North America DrupalCon, with 27 sessions proposed and nearly 200 registered attendees, including a number of current – and no doubt more future – Drupal stars.

Hastily donned hats off to the hard-working organizers, including Susan MacPhee, Kevin Flavin, and Christefano.

For more reasons to be proud to be a New Englander – as if marriage equality were not enough – upcoming Drupal events include, tonight, the Boston Meetup in Providence, Rhode Island on the occasion of a Lullabot invasion and this Friday, for people who want to help refurbish Drupal's home, Kieran Lal of Acquia helps bring a Drupal.org redesign orientation sprint to MIT. And all these events are free.

Agaric has five people attending and submitted five sessions to the Design Camp.  (Looks nice and balanced?  Well, Kathleen Murtagh has images in content, version control, and Zen-sustainable theming, leaving Views 2 theming and RDFa semantic goodness to a couple of the rest of us.)

If you have a burning desire to present, Susan asks for developers to help cover fundamentals.  Or if you feel you'd have liked to help organize a camp and wonder why you didn't know about the planning of this one, not only is it not too late to volunteer this weekend, you can still get in on the ground floor of the second New England DrupalCamp in two months.

It's the one that got away. With many Knight News Challenge projects using Drupal, the dedicated Knight Drupal Initiative (reopening after DrupalCon in March), and Drupal sites for the Knight Foundation's own community, David Cohn must just be deficient in groupthink to have chosen to develop Spot.Us in Ruby on Rails.

Despite my bias, the "Why Spot.Us should have used Drupal" title is tongue in cheek. I'm pretty sure David Cohn (who is smarter, better looking, and always better dressed than me) and the Spot.Us development team will get the following enhancements in place quickly. Especially since, when it comes to winning friends and influencing people there is nothing like a polite, personal, respectful, and massively cross-posted note (but hey, I couldn't find an issue queue).

For what it's worth, here's the list of features that the Spot.Us site lacks that would be automatically or easily provided by a Drupal-based framework:

• Instant login when registering (LoginToboggan)
• Better workflow when registering in general: Currently, you are left on the registration screen after registering, and clicking on the "check your e-mail message" happens to lead to a 404 file not found error (featuring LOLcats, so it's worth registering just to see this.
• One-click e-mail confirmation instead of cut-and-paste your temporary password (Drupal core functionality)
• Ability to be alerted when pitches are added to selected categories (core Taxonomy module and Notifications). Update: The site has categories, but despite signing up as interested in everything I've yet to receive notice of anything.
• Donations to the site in general, not just specific pitches (ECommerce or Ubercart. These could be added as matching funds to others' donations. (Lots of traffic was generated in news articles about the site, and people enthusiastic about the idea with no stories matching their interests should have been able to donate, indeed set up recurring donations, to support the site and the stories chosen by others).
• Integration with other Drupal sites. Not really automatic, but if written by Drupalers there would already be a Spot.Us Drupal module (and probably a Wordpress plugin and a generic drop-in widget) for sites with a stake in a pitch on Spot.Us to solicit donations to that pitch. Drupal sites like the Bay Area's Public Press or, on the other side of the country, Open Media Boston, could pull information from Spot.Us and have one click to get their readers and members involved in crowd-funding a story.
• RSS feeds! Also related to promotion, a Drupal Spot.Us would have built-in RSS for listing of tips and pitches and every category.
• Turn-key local Spot.Us groups (Organic Groups). Instead of only encouraging other people to download the free software (though that is great), Spot.us could allow selected people to curate or manage regional editions beyond California's Bay Area. (Furthermore, people who do install the software themselves could draw on the huge Drupal ecosystem of modules to plug in all this functionality and much more.)

There, I hope that's lit a fire under some Ruby/Rails folk! Now, with all that said – and with only the dedicated few still reading – here's the real point of this post:

None of the above matters.

Just as the code language (PHP) and even quality of Drupal is secondary to its amazing community, the technology of Spot.Us is a distant second in importance to its passion, purpose, and the energy that flows from its reason for being.

As readers of IdeaLab know, Dave launched this thing with a wiki (oh, and a Drupal site of about three pages, which was undoubtedly the critical factor in Spot.Us' success).

Technology can certainly help or hinder the development of community — that is, after all, the premise of the Knight News Challenge — but tools matter far less than a sense of purpose and a drive to see it through.

Of ideas whose time has come, community-funded reporting is definitely one. Please, just to spite me, go make Spot.Us a resounding success without a drop of Drupal. The new breed of local, independent, and smart news sites it will help flourish are as likely as not to be built in Drupal anyway!

I've been working with drupal and have been a part of the community for a fews years now. Although I may not be the most active member around, I have attended a decent amount of drupal meetups all over Massachusetts and New York City.

I think every connection between Drupal and people (and the occasional knight) who are trying to finally get the semantic web built is a good thing.

So I was happy to see where the link went in this e-mail from Calais today:

Live from the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's News Challenge announcements looked a little like the Drupal show. It may not be millions of dollars, but millions more people are likely to be using new local, cutting edge community news Drupal sites within a couple years.

Among the winners:

• Margaret Rosas and her Drupal-focused web shop, Quiddities, will be creating a Drupal installation profile for public radio stations ($327,000).
• Tony Shawcross has his eyes on the 1,000 public access channels across the country. His project is to build them a set of tools in Drupal to share programs and information and where users take a larger role ($380,000).
• Alexander Zolotarev will help the citizens of a small town in Russia share their reactions to becoming the center of the 2014 Olympics ($600,000). (Insider information puts Drupal as the likely platform for this people-powered coverage.)

Other projects may well use Drupal, and they are all amazingly awesome in any case. The caliber of people this round may be indicated by another winner, with Martin Moore, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who uses Drupal to blog. And he did some other thing about inventing the World Wide Web.

My favorite of all though is David Cohn's plan for community funded reporting, Spot.us. But he still hasn't settled on Drupal! So Drupal developers, get ready to respond to his request for proposal. Drupal world domination in the service of reporting in the service of democracy to save the world.

Update Spot.us is surely worthless 'cause it won't be using Drupal. BUT:

Dan Pacheo's Bakersfield-born project Printcasting uses Drupal.

And don't anyone forget the separate, and very exciting, Knight Drupal Initiative, which is for any idea that can make Drupal better for local public interest journalism.

Related: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs.

Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio.

Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools.

I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem.

As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a key opportunity for people doing journalism.

With original investigation and with editorial discretion, real reporting serves to increase the signal and filter out the noise.

However, most ways of generating revenue from journalism come from the editorial role, and news organizations are losing control of this role. Yet the real issue isn't whether Google, Inc. or the New York Times Company does the filtering, it's how whoever has this power uses it.

Ultimately, we can trust controlling the flow of information to no one but ourselves. The future of journalism (and consequently democracy, and humanity, and all that jazz) depends on not allowing private interests to monopolize the lifeblood of human organization, communication.

If we expect to pay for aggregation and filtering services through attention, loss of privacy, and lack of control, and the work of hard reporting is not paid directly, then journalism truly is in trouble.

Subverting this expectation will help build an environment where people sustain hard journalism. We can and should do aggregation ourselves. Investigation we should expect to pay for.

At NewsTools2008 (Journalism That Matters, the Silicon Valley sessions) this week I will be talking to anyone who will listen about mass communication for collaboration with moderation by the many, not the few.

But the reason I have the privilege of a blog at PBS.org/idealab is a less ambitious, more practical project: Related Content.

From before proposing this tool and in the time since, developers have released dozens of modules relating to relating content in Drupal.

What will set the Knight News Challenge-funded Related Content project apart from others is the focus on using computer-suggested relations to make it easier for people to establish human-vetted connections.

So far the project has its information architecture – URI (web address) based, rather than Drupal node-based – and a plugin system to use other modules for related content suggestions. The first public release is coming soon.

The goal is to greatly lower the barrier people's participation in increasing the signal to noise ratio. And yes, to prove we can do it ourselves. Not as opposed to journalistic editorial decisionmaking, which will always have a role in journalism, but as opposed to the overarching aggregators (online and off) that tempt us to exchange control of communication for convenience.

On the last hours of the coding sprint following the amazing Drupal conference, I accosted Steven Peck and asked in person about (one of my many) pet issues: that documentation (or any non-spam node) not be deleted from Drupal.org. Assorted drupallers wandering around MIT agreed with this in principal, but also agreed with Steven that old content referring to unsupported versions of Drupal would have to be very clearly flagged.

Enter the Term message module, which Agaric Design Collective hopes can address this problem.

Right now it uses the Drupal message system and I would like feedback on whether to use that, or blocks, or Drupal hook_help before working on theming.

I'm on the go all weekend and apologize for the hasty work, but this is quite important to me and I would even hope that it become official policy during and for Drupal.org redesign to only archive and deprecate content, never delete and break links.

Save the nodes!