DrupalCon 2006 - Brussels

Just back from DrupalCon in Brussels. Great time, really good to meet a bunch of Drupal folks I'd only exchanged email or Skyped with before, and very exciting to hear about the plans for version 5.0. Highlights of the conference for me were Steven Wittens's presentation on jQuery, meeting Alex, Eric and Ian of Development Seed and oh — Tracy Frauzel and I got to give an impromptu presentation on the requirements prioritisation process we followed on the Greenpeace UK CMS project which I never get tired of talking about (and which I think people were into as well). Let's keep in touch, people!

brussels, bryght, cms, conference, developmentseed, drupal, drupalconbrussels2006, NGO, nptech, open source

Take Back The Web!

Back in May at Web 2.0 for Good I met Chris Anderson of Animal Aid and Tim Street of Campaign Against Arms Trade, two great guys who enjoyed the conference but were hoping for something slightly different (*cough* more activists, less suits). We kept in touch, joined forces with Helen Close of War on Want, and are now announcing Take Back The Web, an open space (+ practical workshops) Web 2.0 conference for grassroots activists — Saturday, October 28, at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton.

I'm quite excited about the day — the event is free, I've heard the venue is amazing, and lunch is a vegan potluck! (I'm thinking maybe I'll bring my vegan gado-gado but I haven't decided for sure.) The conference wiki is here (and still coming together), the upcoming.org listing is here and registration is limited to 40 people so act now!

activism, brighton, conference, grassroots, importantprojects, NGO, nptech, takebacktheweb, tbtw, training, vegan, web2.0

Project Management for NGOs - Prague

I was in Prague last week for the first time — amazing place, highly recommended (photos here). I was there to deliver project management training to a group of 20 APC managers, staff and board members, which happened, was well received, and may be repeated in other APC member countries as part of a larger capacity-building programme already in progress across the organisation. I'm extremely excited about the prospect of continuing work with the APC, and also of having the templates and other training materials I use translated into other languages (which I could/would then post as resources here).

And incidentally, I'm working on two things as a result of the training last week:

1. I'm converting all my templates and training materials to non-proprietary formats.
   I'll start with those that can simply be saved as-is in OpenOffice. Once done, I'll move on to those I need to recreate using other apps (like possibly dotProject to replace my Microsoft Project schedule template and I-don't-know-what for my Visio-based WBS template). I apologise for not having done this sooner!
2. I'm going back to basics in an attempt to develop a set of project management first principles.
   Yoda Max Wideman has already done this, but I need to go through a similar exercise myself, taking into account the specific "cultural ambience" of the NGO sector. I need to be better able to explain the differences between project management concepts and tools and the application of project management concepts and tools.

More on both of these points very soon!

apc, importantprojects, nptech, prague, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, training