Ups and downs again today. Some strong support from Europe again, but the US has yielded no strong continuation. Don't get me wrong, we have people in the US interested in helping, and we're extremely gratefful for that, but we don't seem to have a US project "driver", so it seems to drop to pieces.

I managed to make some good progress this morning with Feeds, Views and Panels. And numerous people added to that progress throughout the day, so we actually got a reasonable amount done.

Having finally sorted out our goals (use the Project EPIC Twitter syntax to get targetted information to people who can help, using Drupal as a tool for managing and organising that data), day 3 started with an ambitious set of tickets:

• Identify and engage with an SMS gateway
• Configure the Feeds module to create nodes
• Create views for displaying aggregated tweet nodes
• Collate list of Haiti resources
• Install Backreference module

So we've started the second day of this project. Our mission is starting to become clearer.

Yesterday, within 7 hours of the effort really getting under way, we had a server, a team, an installation of Development Seed's excellent Managing News, but no real clue about what might be useful. There was a lot of chat about mapping, but Robert pointed out the UN are already doing a stunning job of mapping the crisis and also need volunteers. So dividing the Drupal geo community amongst us would be damaging and stupid.

Then we found this:

You may have noticed a degree of Haiti noise on the Internet today. Michael Caudy kicked things off and Robert Douglass quickly joined him on the campaign trail to get Drupal developers on board to create a Drupal website to help the aid workers hard at their tasks in the aftermath of the earthquake there.

Finally the Beta of Mums+, the community site for parents, is live. I finished off the spit and polish today. Some way to spend a public holiday!

Anyway, if you're curious take a look:
http://www.mumsplus.com

The Beta version is focussed around the Stoke Newington area of North London, but if it is a success the idea is to branch out using Drupal's multi-site capabilities, or perhaps db_rewrite, and create area-by-area sub-domains. Hope it works. Both myself and my friend Liz have put in a lot of effort thus far.