Lisa Williams, with Dan Gillmor and Jane Mackay have published an online report titled “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement” over at Center for Citizen Media.

Whenever such studies get published, I do what I suspect we all do: scan the work quickly looking for self-referential items!

And I found one under the laudatory heading of Who’s Doing Well and Why? Who’s Still Working On It?:

Bluffton Today manages to pull off what so many are trying to do: gather a bustling community on the site that turns over content, making the site fresh to all viewers whenever they might visit. Not only that, the reverse publishing experiment is going well too.

Cool thing #2, the CitMedia site itself runs on Drupal (the report is a Drupal ‘book’).

Such an initiative need not be very expensive. Drupal, the widely-used open source content management system, was brought to 1.0 levels of development by two students in a dorm room with no formal budget whatsoever. Since then it has emerged as the leading open-source content management system, with a growing and thriving community of developers to enhance and support it.

And if you look in the source index, you’ll see reference to MDW’s Spotted photo-sharing software.

Morris Digital Works Suite: Many of MDW’s new signature sites, such as Bluffton Today, are built on the open-source CMS Drupal. But MDW has, in addition, a product line of its own. Some of the products are integrated with their Drupal sites, and others, like Siteweaver, are complete online publishing management systems in their own right. Particularly notable is MDSpotted, a photo gallery package that enables readers to upload photos. MDSpotted is in use at a number of sites owned by Morris Communications, MDW’s parent, but its gained traction well beyond that at sites like WickedLocal.com.

Pretty cool. I’ll have to post more after reading the full report.