Deprecated - Social software and communities

Hi, my brother and I are developing a site at www.curethis.org. We first looked at using Scoop open source software, in perl language and with the strengths of scalability, a neat rating system, and a recent diaries/recommended diaries setup. Then we heard that drupal can now do all of the same things.

I'm a noobee to Drupal, and CMS in general for that matter. I have Drupal installed, as well as Joomla, etc. Just playing around with both. I've read that Drupal is designed for community-driven, social networking, myspace/facebook-type sites. What I would like to know is what specific things/features/architectural design make this so? This is not meant as a Drupal vs Joomla thread. I'd just like to know what things make Drupal so good for this?

I'm new to the Drupal community, so hopefully I didn't reinvent the wheel, despite looking around for what we needed to do.

Please try out my new module:
http://code.google.com/p/drupal-multisite-manager/

I am very new to Drupal and am planning to use it to develop a University Student Government Website.
I was wondering if you have any ideas to what I should include to interest students to visit the site? What pages should I develop to inform and get them involved?
Additionally, If you are interested in developing please post or contact me. Look forward to the the thread in Paid Drupal Services forum.

Hi there -

I'm new to Drupal, and pretty much a non-profit admin guy, not a tech or design guy. That said . . .

The non-profit I work for ( http://www.LibertyTreeFDR.org ) is interested in beefing up our online usability for our membership and friends, and one idea we came up with was to create a kind of online petitioning process for direct legislation. This would be modeled after municipal and state level citizen initiative processes, in which people go out and collect signatures of qualified electors in order to place a particular ordinance, statute, amendment, or resolution on the ballot.

The idea here would be for a petitioning process to be created in which online users can "sign" on to a ballot measure for their community, and once a certain threshold has been reached in a particular amount of time, and certified for procedural sufficiency, the measure would go to a scheduled vote of the body of the whole. In other words, no top-down, fake e-democracy stuff.

Hi, I am new to Drupal.

My goal is to create an extended family website replacing our site hosted on myfamily.com.

First, from what I have read Drupal can handle this. Am I correct?

Second, has anyone published a step-by-step guide on configuring Drupal for a community site?
i.e. which modules to install, what settings to use, etc.

Any advice or direction is very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Lance