In the summer of 2003, we worked on creating a general description of Drupal--an open source content management system (CMS)--for the "About Drupal" page on drupal.org. While Drupal is clearly within the class of applications known as content management systems, we felt that to describe it with that term alone would not present a clear picture of the breadth and range of Drupal's capabilities. Thus, the final description ended up describing Drupal with a total of four characteristics, although notably not distinct:

• content management
• weblog
• discussion-based community software
• collaboration

Recently, weblogs have been described as CMS's. Discussion-based features are common in CMS's. And collaboration is typically facilitated through some workflow process on most CMS's.

Why is it then that the term content management system alone would not suffice? We believe that the term content management is more about product than about the process; it fails to emphasize the social use of CMS's, a mislabeling which places too much emphasis on the content itself at the expense of the communication and collaboration the better of these applications implement. The databases that back most CMS's often do much more than just store documents: they preserve and connect conversations internally (commenting), manage users (user accounts), store lists of links to other pertinent websites (blogrolls), etc.; they facilitate social interaction. In reference to "information seeking behavior," Peter Morville states that "We use people to find content. We use content to find people." Online communities are now less centralized, virtual address specific places or "global villages"--the Well, Yahoo! Groups--and are now instead networked, allowing individuals to make connections across Internet sites rather than merely within them. A prime example: the weblog.

The power of weblogs comes not just from their easy publishing and management of the content, but the social networks of readers and writers that weblogs participate in, as well as the ways in which audience is addressed by the weblog writer in order to participate in the conversations of the Web. Understanding the power of personal webpublishing through blogs is not accomplished by conceptualizing them as huge documentation repositories; it is their ability to support ever-expanding networked connections in the mega conversations on the Internet. In thousands of groups across the blogosphere, communities are defined through the memes they create, not a specific virtual location, a "conversational mess," as Tom Coates describes it, enabled by permalinks, RSS, and trackbacks.

So while technical communications grapples with the use of CMS's to create and manage single-sourcing projects and software vendors develop proprietary learning management systems with a focus on class administration, we want to explore how content management systems are about social interaction. Fortunately, a useful term exists for understanding this aspect of CMS's: social software. As Clay Shirky defines it

1. Social software treats triads of people differently than pairs.
2. Social software treats groups as first-class objects in the system. (qtd. in Allen)

or, more succinctly as

software that supports group interaction (qtd. in Allen)

Even though the term is fairly new, the principles behind social software have been around much longer than the past few years and have informed the development of Internet technology. In his Tracing the Evolution of Social Software, Christopher Allen explains that

. . . the core ideas of social software itself enjoy a much longer history, running back to Vannevar Bush's ideas about 'memex' in 1945, and traveling through terms such as Augmentation, Groupware, and CSCW in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Some early systems which implemented the first social software features present in most full-featured content management systems--i.e., discussion boards and messaging--include the 1970's on Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) and the University of Illinois-Urbana's Plato. Since then, these core capabilities and other features focused on collaboration, community, and communication have continued to be extended and developed in many present day CMS's. One of us is the founder and lead developer of Drupal; the other a researcher in computers and writing interested in Internet communication technologies and Drupal's documentation coordinator. Drawing on our own unique perspective, we hope to provide an insightful look into how CMS's are evolving as social software through an exploration of Drupal and its community of users and developers.