LonDUG Community Project Ideas

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dbashaw's picture
Posted by dbashaw on April 17, 2011 at 6:49pm

At the LonDUG Kickstart meeting there was a lot of interest in LonDUG contributing to the broader London community with a Design/Development project of some kind. Let's use this thread to toss in some ideas about what is needed in our community and how we might build a great project that showcases and builds LonDUG member skills, helps the London non-profit community, and raises awareness of LonDUG.

Brainstorm away... Ideas of all sizes and types are welcome!

Comments

Idea: London Nonprofit CommunitySite

Posted by dbashaw on April 17, 2011 at 7:18pm
dbashaw's picture

This is a big project, but I think the 'multipliers' for the London non-profit community and LonDUG would be immense:

Instead of picking a single organization and building them a specifically tailored Drupal site or community portal, we would build an online 'LonDUG Gardens" style site that would allow London non-profit and community organizations to set up and populate their own mini-sites.

Features and attributes of this project would be:

  • Very 'easy to deploy' non-profit websites with typical features needed by small non-profits.
  • Initial site content would include detailed guidance for the users on how to fill in pages, set up social media, and so on...
  • A meta-community for the participating non-profits that includes shared calendar, forums, etc.
  • Donated hosting/racking by a local ISP and tech companies.
  • Regular intakes and orientation of new local non-profits wanting a site within in the CommunitySite would keep our profile high

Building this would use a great range of skills, engaging LonDUGers at all levels of experience:

  • Drush and developer skills setting up automatic or semi-automatic provisioning of new mini-sites
  • Theming and templating the standard mini-sites that would be available
  • Writing the guiding content for the non-profit organization's members to help them populate and use their site
  • Training and tutoring the non-profits in how to use their mini-site
  • Business development, grant writing and other web business skills to coordinate the project
  • Community management skills to manage the meta-community

You get the picture! This kind of project would need to be scoped appropriately to be manageable, but the multiplier effect would be immense... I also believe that it is the kind of thing that in the future would be grant-fundable for operating costs and would be highly engaging and valuable to LonDUG and the London community overall.

It would also likely lead to a LonDUG CommunitySite distro and related custom modules, building our rep in the Drupal community as well.

It's big... but hey, we have big hearts! :)

London, Ontario

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