Anyone

Any one who is exceedingly good at building and administrating Drupal sites and interested in working on a project for the largest social services agency in Santa Clara county? I help run a house sharing program in the agency and we are trying to take the 27 year old program into the 21st century. Not only that, we are also trying to show the agency that we can communicate better with Free and Open Source tools than we can with the crappy proprietary stuff that we have been dropped on our heads with, by our IT strategy. So if you are interested in social change, facilitating dynamic sharing environments with communications tools, getting involved in city councils, working in a social services agency that has 50 years of roots in the community, and helping knock its old school 1996-communications-tech-ass on its feet! Read forth

Our org is based in San Jose and there are 46 programs which operate here. The agency has embarked on a strategic plan to try and integrate all the services and distribute the agency to smaller, ‘community hubs’ around the south bay… Stirring any ideas yet? As far as I can tell from studying the strategic plan, and interacting closely with the IT team here for our house sharing program, I have no reason to believe that the agency as a whole has a progressive enough communications strategy to allow this to emerge.
Our IT strategy to try and usher this strategic plan into existence is to design, from the ground up, using proprietary methods and behind closed doors, a communications tool in .Net. There is one man coding this. and 284 employees, and 46 programs who they plan on implementing this with.
The non-profit sector loves to reinvent the wheel… and in our case, a really crappy wheel.
I am not a software developer, I have an information design background. I help run a house sharing program here and I am the only one in sight(save IT) that understands the term open source. Drupal came into my radar in 2002 and I have hovered the outskirts of the community ever since trying desperately to understand and put into common words just why this is such a striking sea change in how we communicate. I moved on from simply designing information to an avenue that would allow me to assert the idea that social organization can take on a sea change as well. I believe this is going to be along side an infrastructure sea change as well; the green infrastructure.
If anyone wants to meet and talk about developing communications tools in houses that will be re-designed to facilitate better life collaboration and sharing, maybe become a model for our agencies strategic plan and other non-profits, and showcase a new affordable housing model to the cities of Santa Clara County, please.
Will meet for beers!