Organic Groups

One of the features I'm looking into the improved New Hope Church web site is Organic Groups. Organic Groups is a module for Drupal that allows for the creation of sub-communities in a social networking site. Every social network is made up of a larger collection of individuals that all have a collective goal or interest they are pursuing. However, each individual has their own unique abilities (er, maybe that should be Unique Ability¿, oh wait, this is my blog, not work ;), interests, and agenda. Generally, the individuals will sort themselves into a clique within the larger community that allows them to serve and be served in a way that fits. Organic Groups is the Drupal-way of facilitating this.

How would this be useful to New Hope Church? After installing the module, I would grant each person with the Ministry Leader or Staff Member role the ability to create groups. This includes everyone who runs a LIFE group in our church. Each leader could then create a group for the group or groups they lead. Then, each member of that group can subscribe to the group and gain access to the group discussion. Each group could have a forum for discussions, a calendar of events, documents such as current lesson notes, blogs, prayer requests, audio messages, image galleries, mailing lists, etc. Anything the main site can have, we can allow each group to have within itself. Group data could be made public for anyone to read or private just for subscribed group members and subscription can require approval by the group leader. That's a lot of flexibility.

Okay, sounds great. However, there are a few caveats. This will require work to setup and probably some amount of maintenance. Currently, I'm only one guy with some help from a couple others. However, if this became popular, I'm betting I will have at least one or two other folks interested in helping out. Another caveat is that not everyone will want to participate in the online part of the site. Some may not want to visit the site and some groups, accountability groups, for example, might need a level of privacy that prevents this from being useful to them. That's fine. They don't have to use it if they don't want to, but that doesn't need to limit the others.

The last issue is that I'm basing all of this on my reading of the Organic Group documentation. I've found that implementation, invariably, differs from documentation. Therefore, I suggest that it may not be quite as flexible or cool as I've described, but the general idea is definitely in place and the majority of it does work as I expect (I have demoed parts of the functionality).

Anyway, that's my vision for how to increase LIFE group communications online. This idea was never as fully formed as this, but it has been the general vision from the beginning to facilitate communication and community through the web site from the beginning of this project in 2003. I think we're very close to making this a reality now. I'm excited.

Cheers.