Community
Yes, John. Of course, each person has their own model of what Edgeryders is. Me, I am still stuck in The Virtual Community by @Howard_Rheingold, with a hint of 6th century Western monasticism: I do what I do to contribute building a space where people can live, work and learn together, on the basis of a more-or-less aligned understanding of what should and can be done. This turns out to be really difficult, because even low-overhead, efficient endeavours like Edgeryders have coordination costs, and someone has to saddle them, or the shared space will break down. The idea of building a social enterprise on top of the community is a way to address this issue. But social enterprises, too, are subject to mission drift, and the risk of refocusing on supporting the structure rather than pursuing the ultimate goals is high. For this reason, we also try to build a shared recognition that people in Edgeryders are broadly aligned, and it makes sense even at the individual level to carry some small coordination cost. This involves trying to endow Edgeryders with a sense of place; an idea that people who roam these (mostly virtual, as Howard would say) rooms are probably people you could only not get along with, but work with to stay afloat as humans in a turbulent world. Small success just yesterday: the generous @msanti has decided to cover the cost of accommodation for two more community members to attend 32C3 (ER LBG is paying for 10).
So, while we recognise the value in @elf_Pavlik's dream of a totally interoperable web, where we can seamlessly work together no matter where we are on the web, we prioritise trying to evolve a community where openness, trust and courage are the norm – in the game-theoretical sense that you do not get punished or cheated upon for adopting them. And the resources for tweaking the code base are, alas, always too scarce.
Yes, Edgeryders is Drupal. Our customisation of Drupal 7 is downloadable from GitHub.