Proposed Community Sustainability Modules

The following modules will be proposed and posted on Drupal.org (and maybe on other CMS sites if other cms communities get involved).

If you haven’t guessed already, the underlying agenda of the Sustainability Challenge is to suggest and reinforce these notions: “to whom much is given, much is required”, and “the sum of the whole is greater than the parts”. In the spirit of open source, there is a great need for collaboration to develop modules that can be used by local communities, especially as a hub for microbusiness, to help people survive tough economic times, and to deepen the kinds of local ties that can sustain them.

If you're interested, please feel free to email cftwgreen "at" gmail "dot" com.

LinkIndexing: a proven business model and system created by a friend, which leverages human-created links/comments to generate traffic and then generate revenue. Get in touch if your interested.

LocalBarter: as the headlines roll by on massive layoffs, barter is critical, and something clicked when I spent time in Detroit and discovered a B2B system that is used extensively there (10% unemployment rate, forefront of recession), where a painter can come into a hairstylist, swipe their card in a bricks and mortar transaction, and get what they need with no cash changing hands. The painter earns trade credit from painting, the hairstylist earns credit from cutting hair, and so on. It transcends the basic difficulty in “one to one” barter, where it’s sometimes a challenge to find a match for what you are offering – but this system I discovered has me convinced – it allows people to get by. And in the economic climate in the U.S. and around the world – there are people with reduced amounts of cash/income or no income at all – and I think barter can help people to get by. So I believe that the best of the bricks and mortar and the best of the online needs to be put together, and that it needs to be open, with the barriers as low as possible – and I think the impact can be tremendous, and also generate some revenue as well. Get in touch, a site can be made; help is needed. See JobLife, LocalBarter mention in Resources.

ReGiftCard: a concept for a method of ecommerce where a gift card can be purchased outright, and a portion of the gift card goes to the charitable cause of choice: “conscience based commerce”. The gift card can be physical or virtual. See www.regiftcard.net

FrameAds: a local microbusiness based on the display of advertisements using digital picture frames, which can be updated either manually via flash drive, or potentially using Bluetooth technology. See www.frameads.org

SMS Alerts: multi-channel broadcast alerts facilitated by the Drupal-SMS gateway – this may require more concrete estimates of costs involved but the essential value proposition is to provide a way to inform local citizens about non-emergency situations such as school closings, etc., but also to explore multi-channel emergency alerts to use every available means to reach local residents in an emergency situation, including rampage situations at public schools and area colleges, etc. (ex: Virginia Tech). This may be more of a public service than a business as module, but if the basic loopnote platform were purchased, it could be open sourced and made available for free (around the world). See www.loopnote.com but don’t bother the owners, they are busy with brightkite.com – if you are independently wealthy and a believe in this and would like to help free loopnote, see me. Or bother Todd Tomlinson from www.ahaconsulting.com to extend the fine work he’s been doing already with a broadcast sms module and see if he’d release it to open source.

Community Heritage/Digital Archaeology/LifeStoryNews: this is a joint project with Sophia Liu, which could help moms, scrapbookers and others to scare up some income by helping people to capture their life stories, and these stories could be posted on the local community site. See www.digitalarchaeology.org