Hey all,
I represent a group that creates innovative ways to allow US servicemen in Iraq to call on the full knowledge and productive power of US civilians to assist with the reconstruction process in Iraq. Currently, we are trying to design a site that allows US servicemen to post requests for missing goods and knowledge (water filters or a blueprint for how to set up a microfinance operation, for instance), and allows US civilians to make public commitments to meeting these requests by a specified time. Each user, of course, has their own profile with a history of user reviews from previous interactions, and their are other community and social networking tools. There is an Administrator that can edit/delete/add/see anything. You can see our (albeit buggy) prototype here: www.beyondorders.org
We had the site designed in ASP and we are now thinking of moving to a Drupal solution open source located at sourceforge. There are many individuals with a wide variety of experiences in the NGO and military worlds who have far more knowledge about what kinds of web apps might be needed and how to design them, which is why we would like to use an open source solution--we would allow them to contribute.
Right now, however, I'm not sure exactly how to manage the open source development. First of all, do you think Drupal is the right solution for this site? Second, I want to have a large variety of people be able to contribute, but at the same time, I want to be able to get long-term reliability and accountability. How would I organize the development of the site, personelle-wise, financially, schedule-wise, etc. to ensure these things? Is open source even the right solution for this kind of site? Or perhaps Drupal would probably take care of so much that it might be better not to have open source?