Aaron Couch

Drupal is at heart a content publishing platform. A way to share information as quickly and as accessibly as possible. In the U.S. right now there is no more important dialogue then that surrounding the economic recovery. It affects everyone. This is why Zivtech is proud to announce the launch of the Keystone Research Center's flagship site: http://keystoneresearch.org As a research and policy development institute, the Keystone Research Center (KRC) conducts original research, produces reports, and promotes public dialog that addresses important economic and civic problems, and proposes new policies to help resolve those problems. The KRC's site launch coincides with the release of their annual report The State of Working PA 2009 which found that the federal stimulus has worked to halt the economic free fall of six months ago. The bad news is that 'inflation-adjusted wages for middle-class workers have declined over the past year,' while 'the the incomes of the wealthiest Pennsylvanians have surged to new highs.' 192,000 Pennsylvanians have lost their jobs since December 2007, though the losses have decreased from 31,000 a month between February and April to 9,200 in the last three months.

I'm proud to announce the Views Galleriffic module which I've been working on at Drupal.org. It is a simple views plugin for the awesome Galleriffic Jquery plugin.

I attended this day long series of discussions on June 23rd about how Philly can best take advantage of the Broadband Stimulus Package. Cities can start applying for stimulus $, as an announced last week by Joe Biden, starting next week. In Philly the digital divide is a serious issue. An estimated 50% of the city does not have daily internet access (though there are no good studies on this which in itself indicates how overlooked this is). The Digital Justice Coalition and Media Mobilizing Project have done great work around bringing this issue to light as has the Digital Impact Group http://www.wirelessphiladelphia.net which is a rebranding of Wireless Philadelphia after the failure of Earthlink and Mayor Street.

People's Emergency Center had a forum yesterday (see attached) on homeless youth in Philly and Jennifer Linn, who is one of the only reporters covering this topic over the last couple of years, did a write up. It doesn't sound like there is much 'news' here. It is the same story for the hundreds of kids in city shelters and thousands who are homeless everyday.