The purpose of this project website is, on the one hand, to make deliverables and prototypes available for review and commenting to our users.
On the the other hand, the site provides a training ground for us. That is why we chose to build it from scratch using drupal, rather than using a wordpress blog or other hosted solution. Some of the functionality required by icarda.org will also be needed bt the users this site. I am concretely thinking of calender, RSS feed implementation, custom user profiles, knowledge base wiki, etc.
As we are building these features, we are learning how to implement and scale them for the larger site.