Drupal for NGOs

Last year when I was finishing up my work with Greenpeace UK and about to begin development with Amnesty International I thought "Hey, I should really introduce the Greenpeace UK web team to the Amnesty web team — they're both going to be using Drupal and there are bound to be opportunities for knowledge sharing. Maybe even co-development!"

I'd been talking to Oxfam International at the time as well and now they're moving to Drupal (and there's Comic Relief who I know run at least one Drupal site and Concern Worldwide who I'm working with now) — there are a lot of NGOs in the UK (and nearby) who are using Drupal and who could benefit from meeting up face-to-face on a monthly or bi-monthly basis to share information and experiences.

And I'm happy to report that it now looks like this is definitely going to happen!

Some time in early June, possibly at the Amnesty office on Easton Street but definitely in London, a group of people from a number of the organisations mentioned above and myself will be hosting the first meeting of Drupal for NGOs: an approximately 2 hour get together (followed by drinks at a nearby pub) to talk about Drupal, which contributed modules we're using, what our experiences have been and, I hope, what our plans are for the future.

PLUS: it may be the case that Jeff Robbins of Lullabot will be in town at the same time and will deliver a bit of a keynote to the group following on from his "How Drupal Will Save the World" post last year.

If you're interested in attending, please comment here or send me an email. I'll create an event in Upcoming once the details have been finalised and post an official announcement here and on the Drupal UK users site.

Huzzah!

amnesty, comicrelief, concern, drupal, greenpeaceuk, importantprojects, lullabot, nptech, oxfam, softwaredevelopment

Concern Worldwide "Next Generation Web" Project

Last month when I was in New Orleans for 08NTC I got a call from Enable Interactive in Bristol asking if I wanted to co-pitch with them on a very large CMS/CRM project for Concern Worldwide. We talked about it more when I got back to London, then went for it, then won the contract — w00t!

We were in Dublin at Concern's head office on Monday for the kick-off meeting and I've just spent the last two days in Bristol getting to know the Enable team and working with the folks at Concern to define the objectives for the project (which I'll blog about in another post — I'm quite excited about the work we've done there).

We're still working out our high-level plan for the next several months, but basically we're moving all of Concern's sites to Drupal, very likely integrating with CiviCRM and then with a number of existing systems as well. And we'll being following Scrum to get it all done (and I'm currently looking for an outstanding Scrum trainer in Dublin or London to train the entire team on the framework/process — if you are one or know one please get in touch with me).

Should be fun :-)

concern, civicrm, drupal, enableinteractive, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, softwaredevelopment