World Social Forum 2008 Global Day of Action

wsf2008.net [update circa 2018: domain no longer controlled by the World Social Forum]

Synopsis

In 2008, the World Social Forum was not held in one or two locations, as it had in other years since the first Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. Agaric Design Collective created WSF2008.net to enable groups all over the world to plan and publicize participation in the Global Call for Action, with demonstrations and workshops held in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

The site included:

• groups ("action spaces") complete with mailing lists that are created and geo-located in the same step as initiating the first planned action
• the ability to contact all registered users
• multiple content types for users to post both to groups, or action spaces (such as actions, discussions, wiki pages) and to sitewide locations (such as blog posts and FAQs)
• the functionality to translate the user interface and all content into more than a dozen languages, featuring a patch to make Panels module language-aware that served up the best available translation more intelligently than even Internationalization module working with Drupal core.

Note: Agaric is not involved in the current maintenance, hosting, or redesign of the site.

Execution

Some of Agaric's full services:

• Original design
• Place module in use with location module to allow user-contributed definitions of localities, states/provinces, and countries; sorting and navigation of same; and mapping of regions, not just actions..
• Integration with Google Maps.
• Modification of organic groups to allow creation of planning group and action in one step: http://data.agaric.com/merging-forms-usability-creating-nodereference-or-organic-groups-nodes-within-node
• Full localization of the interface and internationalization (translation functionality) for content, including improvements to Panels module contributed as a patch back to the community: http://data.agaric.com/remixing-drupal-agaric-way-multilingual-panels
• Performance optimization of site including fixing internationalization bugs and using the Boost module.
• Installation of site on new servers.
• Several design and functionality changes through several iterations of group planning; participation in planning process.
• On-call troubleshooting through the deployments and active span of the site.

All of our research and discoveries (and trials and tribulations) and changes are thoroughly documented on Agaric's public site: (moved here to data.agaric)

And many issues are posted to the installation profile project for WSF Action on Drupal.org:
http://drupal.org/project/wsf_action

For upgrade, note:
http://agaricdesign.com/note/important-modified-modules-wsf2008