Next month I'm heading home to Toronto to participate in Social Tech Training, a three-day, hands-on, Web 2.0-oriented learning intensive for people working in the social change sector, presented by members of the Web of Change community in partnership with MaRS.

A whole bunch of people I really admire and respect are going to be there, I get to present on what I'm really, really into at the moment and I expect to meet dozens of people doing amazing and interesting work — it should be awesome :)

Hope to see you there!

importantprojects, MaRS, nptech, socialtechtraining, STT, toronto, webofchange

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

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

Thanks, everybody :)

Cake recipe. Icing recipe. Party details.

anniversary, birthday, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment

I want to quickly plug the second installment of Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects, the Aspiration/Idealware-organised event I attended in New York a couple of months ago (and thoroughly enjoyed). Having just been at 08NTC in New Orleans, and with a trip to Toronto coming up in June, I'm not going to be able to make it there myself, but do strongly recommend it to any of you not-for-profit technology project managers out there who can :-)

All the details are available on the Aspiration site, but here's a snippet:

Register online now!

aspiration, aspirationtech, conference, idealware, importantprojects, MNTP, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment

Next week I'm heading to New Orleans! I've been invited to present at NTC 2008 so I'm making the long haul and staying for just under a week. I've invited Jenn Sramek of CivicActions to co-present with me — we're going to talk about how we worked together on amnesty.org last year. Here's a description of our session, Project Management for Techies: Delivering on Time and Budget — hope to see you there!

08NTC, civicactions, conference, importantprojects, jennsramek, nptech, NTEN, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, training

Great day on Friday last week — I was invited by my good friend and colleague Phillip Smith to deliver a project management lunch & learn to the folks at the New Internationalist communications co-operative in Oxford. Really interesting to speak with such a tight-knit, structurally-flat and financially-independent organisation beginning to think about making changes to how it operates after 30 years of producing an award-winning publication.

If it ain't broke don't fix it, sure — but when endeavoring to do something new, something you haven't done before, something involving risk by definition, it makes good sense to set SMART objectives, explicitly assign roles and responsibilities (even — especially? — in flat organisations; see The Tyranny of Structurelessness for more on this), define requirements and formally communicate with all team members on a regular basis (i.e. consciously and intentionally manage the project).

Thanks again for having me, NI — I had a great time meeting you all and hope to see you all again sometime :)

communitybandwidth, importantprojects, newinternationalist, nptech, phillipsmith, projectmanagement, training

I get to facilitate three sessions while I'm there as well — one called PM Principles: Values-Based Project Management (where I'll pick up where I left off at Web of Change last fall), another called The Art and Science of Defining Scope (run don't walk) and another called Agile Project Management (where I'll be keen to share some of the things I learned last year managing Project IMPACT for Amnesty using Scrum).

I'm also very excited to meet Laura S. Quinn (who I've spoken to over Skype but never met in person) and Gunner (who I've heard is the single best facilitator in nptech). Thoughts and photos when I return :)

aspiration, aspirationtech, conference, idealware, importantprojects, MNTP, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment

Happy International Human Rights Day!

activism, amnestyinternational,humanrights, importantprojects, irenekhan, internationalhumanrightsday, nptech, theelders

I'm exhausted and can't really express what I'm feeling at the moment, but we're live — the International Secretariat of Amnesty International has re-launched its new, completely re-architected, W3C Web Content Accessibility-compliant, data protection law and privacy legislation-compliant, multi-lingual and totally open source Drupal, CiviCRM and Alfresco-based website. I'll blog in more detail later but in the meantime want to thank Fortune Cookie, CivicActions and the truly amazing group people I've had the pleasure to work with at Amnesty for getting this done :)

alfresco, amnestyinternational, civicactions, civicrm, crm, cms, drupal, fortunecookie, humanrights, impact, importantprojects, nptech, open source, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment

A couple weeks back I got to speak with Laura S. Quinn of idealware (w00t!) about an article she was writing for the good people at TechSoup called Six Views of Project Management Software (and thanks, Heather Gardner-Madras, for making the connection there).

The article provides a really nice overview of the kinds of things not-for-profit project managers and teams might need software tools to help them do and is up on TechSoup now — check it out!

article, heathergardnermadras, idealware, importantprojects, laurasquinnnptech, projectmanagement, softwaretechsoup, tools

Hug your project manager and please go easy on the animal products today. Happy International Project Management and World Vegan day!

activism, environment, food, green, importantprojects, internationalprojectmanagementday, noanimalproducts, nptech, projectmanagement, sustainability, vegan, worldveganday

I think this is my what — fourth post on Project IMPACT since I started working on it back in January? It's been such an intense and challenging project I simply haven't had time to blog about it properly (or about much of anything else come to think of it — my apologies, Alex, for not responding to your Basecamp workflow or Web of Change session notes yet).

The update, then: we're now heading into our fifth of five development sprints with CivicActions (we've been using Scrum to manage the technical development stream of the project — lots of valuable lessons learned there to relay another time) and are finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel (for the last five months, we've been working to completely rebuild http://amnesty.org in Drupal, integrate the new site with CiviCRM, and to integrate Drupal with Alfresco, the open source document management system Amnesty has selected as a replacement to its existing repository of 100,000+ reports).

Next week, Jenn and Jacob of CivicActions come back to London, the week after that we'll be joined by Sam, and I'm hoping that when we're all in a room together instead of a bunch of different time zones, I'll actually have a chance to blog about the project in more detail. And until then I really should get back to work :)

alfresco, amnestyinternational, civicactions, civicrm, crm, cms, drupal, humanrights, impact, importantprojects, nptech, open source, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment

Tomorrow I'm heading to Vancouver for the 7th annual Web of Change conference. I've been twice before — once in 2004 and then again in 2005. Totally excited to go back :)

This year I'll be leading a session called Values-based Project Management where I'm hoping participants will be as keen as I am to:

I'm also hoping to have some time in the day-and-a-bit leading up to the conference to post an update on Project IMPACT! Things are going well there but I've been too heads down to write about it. More on that ASAP :)

importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, values, webofchange, webofchange2007, woc2007

Next week I get to present at SANGONeT's third annual "ICTs for Civil Society" conference in Johannesburg, South Africa!

I was scheduled to be in Johannesburg to deliver my Project Management for NGOs training for the African members of the APC later the same week, Matthew de Gale of SANGONeT was looking for someone to present on how NGOs can benefit from using RSS, someone from the APC mentioned me and I'm in! And my good friend Katrin Verclas of NTEN will be there as well! Magic. I'll be sure to report back with my photos and learnings :)

africa, apc, ICTs, importantprojects, johannesburg, nptech, rss, sangonet, southafrica, training