So last month The Moms gave me a copy of EMERGENCE: The Connected Lives Of The Ants In Your Brain And Stuff. It's one of a half dozen recent best-seller tomes about how the actions of relatively dumb autonomous units can combine and interact to form unexpectedly powerful and weird results. (I think the creators of VOLTRON understood this a long time ago, but it wasn't until like 2003 that politics and pop-science caught up.)

So it turns out that one of the important characteristics a swarm needs to have in order to become EMERGENT is what the academics call locality, which basically means that neighbors interact with each other. So that instead of having a big textureless mass of isolated entities, we begin to form whorls and knots of interest and feedback and happenstance.

This was all on my mind last night at Drupal DC Meetup. I have this totally unsubstantiated feeling that DistrictDrupal, in combination with burgeoning posses in LA, San Francisco, NYC and elsewhere, are both symptoms of and engines powering the exponential growth and maturation of the Drupal project that everyone is slightly-hesitantly sure we're beginning to see.

Unsurprisingly, the people I spoke with had pretty different priorities from what I hear coming out of the Drupal mainstream. The big questions here were about advocacy: CRM, bulk mailing, peer-to-peer campaigns, media outreach, event organizing. The big stars of the show were Views.module and DevSeed's SeedCampaign media outreach tool and EchoDitto's criminally-underrecognized (not that I'm biased) Open-Source Repository.

Techies aside, we also had peoples from at least a dozen local NGOs in the process of transitioning to Drupal: NDI, The Quixote Center, New America Foundation, Ashoka, The Middle East Institute and Green Media Toolshed.

So it looks a lot like Drupal is becoming a major engine of the DC nonprofit/political sector's web presence. And now that Tim Cullen has shoehorned Drupal onto the US Senate's archaic SQLite servers (Fairfield county, represent!), maybe we'll even see more incumbents taking advantage of it as well. (ha.)

All of these efforts are going to be working towards very similar goals, so the key to success is Collaboration-- online organizers and techs from these groups need a place to lay out their projects and priorities, find out what they've got in common, coordinate and communicate, avoid redundant effort, and hopefully finally catch our technology up with our ideas. You know, like Voltron.

Anyway, large props and thanks to everyone who came out-- ESPECIALLY to Eric and Jeff from Development Seed (who picked up a startlingly-high SMS-enhanced bar tab) and resident Drupal-illuminati M3avrck for putting the whole shabazz together. See you guys next time.