I posted a story a few posts back about developing a shared housing program in San Jose, Ca. My friend and Co-worker has decided to make a lateral shift in the agency opening up probably a nice sum of money that we will need to use inorder to run the program.There is now potentially money for a drupal developer who might be intersted in working at the largest human services agency in Santa Clara County. This is not an official job posting, I am just interested in opening up some discussion in this area of the Drupal community. I am actively trying to redevelop the program using only Open Source communications. I believe that this agency together with the opensource community can have a far reaching impact in the non-profit world and Drupal just seems to be an amazing, boundless tool to prove it.
This is a shared housing program that we are redeveloping, and it is in the housing deivision along side refugee services, and financial education. They all make up the Economic Development Services and the agency is trying to figure out how they can all interoperate. The Shared Housing Program has established contracts with City of San Jose, Milpitas, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and Urban County. The program is 27 years old and it is having a hard time transitioning into the communications age, along with the rest of the agency. Our IT strategy is to build from scratch a CRM solution, but as far as I can see, there is no thought to content management which will make a fruitless journey towards integrating services here. My thought it that we can prove open source with Drupal in redeveloping an ailing program that has been the corner stone of the housing division.
Are you interested in any or all:
-Interacting with city planners
-social services
-intersted in cooperatives, or cmmmunal living
-passion for architecture especially energy efficient or ecological architecture
-proving open source as the right choice for non-profits
-like to interact with people
-and need I say, Love to do amazing and awe-inspiring things with Drupal!
If you can think of anyone who might be interested in this, please email me or have them email me.
thanks
tim
Comments
'cyborg case manager'
This idea is still floating around our office at this point. infact there is a more reason than ever to develop a better management system and we are loosing people like crazy becuase our organization/communications is lacking and it gets frustrating very quickly.
I was able to get the attention of our IT department back to our program and I have been spending a few hours a week with them talking about how to develop a tool for the program and it has been interesting to say the least.I was under the impression that we had to use our IT department's 'client' they are developing(actually its just one developer) in .NET, but word from their mouth is that we don't have to use their solution luckily! Both of them are from corporate tech companies in the bay area and are steeped in the windows world. Neither of them read any websites and have no concept of 'web 2.0' phenomenon. Neither of them are very interested in the open source community, and one of them said that he didn't really know anything about non-profits. Conclusion: I'm going to advise our program heads that we invest our money in the drupal/civicspace/civicrm communities and code bases.
It just makes so much sense to me that the non-profit sector defines itself alongside the OSS community, but it has been a tough reality to face the 'masses' in my organization and have them realize it too. Most everyone in our office have little to no care for computers and their potential for better organization, or they are down right hostile towards the issue. Any thoughts or suggestions about this?
Lastly, again, this post is something of a bump for the original post. I don't know exactly how it would go down, but I am chomping at the bit to work alongside someone who knows drupal really well, learn how to use it while making a killer housing program in a large, well funded and well respected organization, and I'm very confident that we could make that happen. I don't code, but I know the ins and outs of the program we are going to migrate, and I understand drupal/internet technologies enough to make a good partner in developing the concepts and tools. Of course, its non-profit, so the pay isn't high, I personally get paid 30,000/year.
My idea is that this isn't just a special project where we develop the tool and thats it. I envision developing a new model for case management; kinda like making a cyborg case manager if you will, by pushing our organization and communications into the drupal environment.
Next Steps: new beginings
Yesterday I sat down with my program supervisors and expressed my want to develop our program with an open source community(thats you). I always think I have it all worked out in my head before I jump into such a conversation(and at this point there have been quite a few), but it never ceases to amaze me the types of questions I get thrown back to me from someone who "[doesn't] know a thing" about computers. I tried to express this:
I've got a job and a steady pay check. I like my office and the people I work with are amazing human beings. But I have been holding back for selfish reasons of job security BUT I think I want to make more of a statement in the new year. I managed to get a meeting called with the the director of Economic Development, IT, and my housing team. I will try and sell them on the concept of piloting out division with open source tools... because non-profits need to understand better collaboration through communications. And ,shit... we're in silicon valley!!??
consider open source, or two weeks notice...
tim