The purpose of this e-consultation was to determine the scope and mode of operation of the AgriDrupal initiative. The e-consultation took place between 9 September and 12 October 2010. There were a total of 35 contributions from 12 participants. The discussion organized along three questions:

• What are the participants using Drupal for at the moment, and what are the plans for further development 
• What kind of support from other institutions in the agricultural domain would be useful?
• Is there a need to develop specific modules or application profiles?
  • Are there other areas of cooperation?
  • If we decide to work together, how should this be organised?

Responses to the first question

“What are you using Drupal for at the moment, and what are your plans for further development?”

We have received 10 responses from organisations.  Of them 7 are using Drupal, two are planning to do so and one is following this discussion to see if there is reason to replace their current Content Management System.

The main use concerns

• The maintenance of internal (3) or external (7) websites.
• Two of these above institutions mention decentralized maintenance and two mention the use of social media to collect content.

Other uses are

• an OA repository (1),
• a library (1),
• a registry of services,
• feed aggregation (1)
•  a larger information service / database (1) (in combination with Lucene)

Future plans concern

• multilingual interfaces,
• automatic assignment of keywords,
• fast site development for external parties
• setting up projects/ experts databases,
• harvesting external information,
• setting up feed aggregation,
• setting up repositories (2)
• Linked data / semantic web applications (3)

Responses to the Second question

“What kind of support from other institutions in the agricultural domain would be useful?”



Possible areas for support:

• Sun Yat Seng University : there is an active user community for Drupal in China. Agridrupal could work “as a service engine to connect practitioners stimulate people to share and communicate as what FAO has done with AGROVOC, similarly.”
• Global Rangelands sees semantic web application as a potential area of collaboration, as this would go beyond the capacities of the local support for Drupal.
• IIT Kanpur suggests that the community can work with Agropedia and Openagri, and give feedback.
• Kainet suggest that we maintain collaboratively a FAQ document.
• FAO suggests that the community could make sure that if someone develops relevant functionality (Agrovoc thesaurus module, a soil map module etc.), it should be shared
• Several other contributors suggested would serve primarily for the exchange of practical experiences

A number of issues were raised but not discussed further in response to this question:

• Do we promote the use of a specific Content Management System (Drupal)
• Can Agridrupal serve as a test bed for functionality that can be developed for other CMS’ than Drupal as well?

Responses to the third question

• “Is there a need to develop specific modules or application profiles?”
• “Are there other areas of cooperation?”
• “If we decide to work together, how should this be organised?”

It was concluded that AgriDrupal should not be coined for a specific ‘turn-key’ software product. FAO indicated that it will share its experiences in developing applications that meet the need of partner organisations. Although there is no clear line between what support the general Drupal community can give, and what the agricultural community could do specifically there is a general agreement that AgriDrupal should be primarily a platform for the exchange of experiences. Especially applications that handle specific agricultural vocabularies or the use of existing modules for organisations like extensions services are an important area for exchange. Interesting experiences from the nature conservation community were shared where an installation was developed that handles common information types like people / experts; organizations; documents and references; projects; and connections between this information. No specific recommendations were made how the community could be organised.