Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
Rolf, Shannon and I delivered our workshop to a roomful of amazing Web of Changers yesterday afternoon here on Cortes. One of the interesting things we learned in developing the content for the workshop was that the debate I think Phillip Smith thought would be created by pairing a couple of project managers with a community development facilitation expert didn't actually happen. Instead, we agreed with each other — for Rolf, Shannon and I, project management tools and techniques, "traditional" or otherwise, can be applied to community development and/or open source projects because project management is about just that — the appropriate application of skills, knowledge, tools and techniques :)
Phillip — care to argue otherwise?
The winners of the 2005 Showcase Ontario Voluntary Sector Awards have been announced. Congratulations!
Greetings from Vancouver! I'm out here for a few days in advance of Web of Change, visiting friends and collaborating on a workshop I'll be co-facilitating at the conference with Rolf Kleef of drostan.org and Shannon Roy of Thinkhive. I lived in Vancouver for a couple of years after finishing university, and it's great to be back and spending time walking through my old neighbourhoods, eating at my old favourite restaurants, seeing old friends and meeting their new babies :)
The workshop I'm working on with Rolf and Shannon is called "Getting things done: managing software, people, and projects," and will focus on how project management tools and techniques can be applied to open source software and/or community development projects. It should be interesting — I get the sense that Phillip Smith hopes to set up a bit of a debate around whether or not what he calls "traditional project management" can be effectively applied to community/volunteer-based projects, and has put Rolf, Shannon and I together as co-facilitators for that reason. More on this as our collaboration progresses :)
The project management training participants I've been working with at the LEF are in the middle of their 6 week practicums right now — 7 teams have been paired with 7 not-for-profit organizations to manage 7 different technology projects, 4 of which are open source content management system implementations. Because the 4 CMS teams are doing all of this for the first time, and because their timelines are as tight as they are, they've all decided to use the same CMS so they can share learnings and divide up work where possible.
The teams have chosen Drupal as the CMS to standardize on, and this morning, we brought in Derek Laventure of the Annares Working Group, a worker co-operative providing open source software development and training services to not-for-profits and NGOs, to take them through a 3 hour tour of Drupal and get them started. Derek presented a really well defined set of step-by-step instructions for configuring Drupal, modifying themes, installing contributed modules and performing advanced customizations. Highly recommended if you need to take a group through Drupal training yourself!
