Vermont (pop. 621,000) is a small, tightly knit rural state proud of its independent spirit and high levels of civic engagement. Vermont’s independent sector (3000+ organizations, $4 billion annual revenue) plays a primary role in the delivery of human and cultural services and in the preservation of the state’s cherished natural resources. Most social services—food, shelter, healthcare and education—are delivered within local and regional community settings.

Often separated by geography (mountains, rivers, lakes), Vermont’s 251 towns and 14 counties are increasingly knit together by broadband “build-out”. Common Good Vermont leverages these electronic networks to bridge the barriers of Vermont’s geography and the “beaten paths” of its hyper-local networks. New human and electronic networking activities will support the delivery of information and innovation to the state’s community builders: project volunteers and professionals who, by virtue of their civic and nonprofit roles and responsibilities, are the lifeblood of the “green mountain state”. Common Good’s place-based and community virtual events are designed to improve the capacity of so many “small networks” that, improve Vermont’s unique “quality of life”.

Common Good Vermont aggregates content for (and from) Vermont independents and nonprofits by pulling in RSS and Atom feeds including blogs, news sources, social bookmarks, and event calendars. The goal is to serve as an information hub encouraging knowledge sharing and increasing cross-organization communication. Content is currently organized by a combination of taxonomy (categories defined by Common Good Vermont staff) and folksonomy (tags from the feeds themselves). Our goal is to eventually remove the taxonomy layer and have all content organized completely by broad and, to a lesser extent, narrow folksonomy. However, the taxonomy layer is there for now to allow a certain amount of curation while we seek out, connect, and aggregate additional sources of information.

Common Good Vermont is built using Zend Framework and hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Components from Zend Framework used include its MVC system, Zend_Application, Zend_Feed_Reader, Zend_Tag_Cloud, Zend_Search_Lucene, Zend_Paginator, Zend_Db, Zend_Date, Zend_Auth, Zend_Acl, and Zend_Form. Stay tuned for future iterations to the website!

The latest iteration of the website includes eCommerce functionality allowing ThinkFlood to sell their RedEye device directly to consumers. The eCommerce section includes a shopping cart and an easy-to-use two page checkout process. While the checkout process is simple for end users, there’s quite a lot happening behind the scenes with the integration of multiple APIs. The website is built using Zend Framework and thanks to Rackspace Cloud Sites everything has remained running smoothly even with all of the press coverage and associated traffic.

As much as I like Rackspace, the point of this blog post isn’t to praise them. They’ve been making a big marketing push on their cloud offerings lately but I get the impression that Cloud Sites (the service we use) is the, “oh, yeah, we offer that too” service. They seem to be unaware of the potential of one of their own service offerings and push people who need a “serious” solution to Cloud Servers. Cloud Sites is an excellent platform as a service for people running PHP or .NET web applications who have better things to do with their time than manage the hardware or software layers below their PHP or .NET applications. Sure, Cloud Servers takes away the hardware layer management but you still have to manage the software layer (operating system, PHP or .NET, MySQL, etc.) yourself and deploy individual virtual servers if you need more capacity.

Part of this impression comes from Rackspace’s recent marketing efforts around their cloud offerings. Some of it also comes from the technology behind Cloud Sites. For example, one of the big pain points (for me) with Cloud Sites is lack of support for features that would make application deployments easier. I understand why ssh isn’t supported since there is no single machine to remote into. They do support sshfs which is useful and solves part of that problem. However, support for public key authentication and symlinks (symlinks work but aren’t officially supported) would go a long way towards making application deployments less painful. It’s my impression that features like these aren’t included in Cloud Sites because Rackspace thinks that people who want them should use Cloud Servers instead. If that is what they think, then they’re missing the point of how dead simple and awesome an application platform Cloud Sites could be.