First off, what is Gnomepal?

Gnomepal is an open sourced effort to take the Drupal platform and build an amazing install profile so that anyone can build and maintain a powerful online community. Yes, I just made that up.

Chris Pirillo is taking the lead on this project and has humbled himself to yield to the technical knowledge of the Drupal community to make it happen. I sat through a great deal of the initial conference call this past Saturday which Chris and many Drupal developers began their efforts. What I heard was an echo of my previous blog post concerning the situation. I spoke with Chris briefly on my concerns and he assured me that one of my concerns (about the project possibly dying) are null and void since the project is Open source. I think his words were “It will live forever”. While I have my reservations believing the “forever” part of that statement, I did understand his point.

While I am aware the feature set needed for this endeavor to take off will most likely happen, I’m still skeptical of the techosphere‘s mental willingness to accept it. In an effort to aid this situation, here are some reasons why I believe you should care about Gnomepal and possibly contribute to it:

• Communities are important – This is a no-brainer. The driving factor in any web success is community. Youtube’s feature set is behind that of blip.tv, viddler, and metacafe, but Youtube’s community is what makes them amongst the top 5 most visited websites on the internet. Gnomepal puts the power of community forming in your hands.
• Ease of use attracts users – A primary reason why bloggers use WordPress is due to its famous “5 minute installation”. With its cpanel one-click installation support, and dead simple import process from engines like Blogger, Moveabletype, and Livejournal, WordPress has built its user base by removing barriers to entry. Gnomepal aims to provide less barriers to entry for building your own community. It aims to make it dead simple. So simple, your local little league coach can build a web community for all the teams in the league. Play ball!
• Social relevance is the future – We’ve moved beyond the basic needs to join a social network such as Facebook, Myspace, or Ning network #223433. The next logical step is to filter the massive amounts of individual data to that of relevance. Translation: I don’t want to see drunken frat party pictures, I want to see pictures of Yorkshire Terriers and beach landscapes. How will existing social networks know this? Gnomepal looks to build relevance around the social web. You will only see what interests you.
• Users want to build and share, not write code – Ouch. As a geek, that hurt my inner being, but it’s true. The majority of the social web doesn’t want to learn a new templating engine, CSS, HTML, PHP, and mySQL in order “pimp” their presence. Gnomepal looks to provide superior ease of customization while maintaining power and flexibility
• Data ownership is critical – I learned something about this one. Allowing privately owned companies to harvest your content in exchange for free usage is not always a fair deal. Case in point, Facebook. Think about all the activity performed there daily: All the pictures, all the quizzes, the polls, the discussions, the conversations. Facebook owns that data, not the user. Disqus is a great commenting system which is so easy to use and will seduce you in seconds, but guess what? The data is out of your control. FriendFeed is a great mechanism for discussing the social web, and I use it daily. All of the comments, data relevance information (likes, dislikes), and the like are not completely under your control. While FriendFeed (and possibly Disqus) does have data portability options so that you CAN own it, it’s not trivial to do so. Gnomepal looks to build communities, with the same power as FriendFeed, Facebook, and Disqus, but give you data ownership and the option to do whatever you wish with that data. Easily.

Now all of these reasons may sound utopian in nature, but I’m convinced it is definitely possible to build on Drupal. The variable here is whether WordPress/Joomla/Moveabletype die-hards will put it down for a day to try this out. If any of this interests you, I urge you to follow the effort (and hopefully contribute) to Gnomepal. It’s not all about Chris Pirillo (it’s ok to hate him ), it’s not all about Drupal (ok to hate Drupal too), it’s not all about taking the other guys down, but it’s definitely about empowering you to build an online community.

Let’s make it happen.

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