Project Tools for Grassroots Activism

This project is currently being developed at Activism Labs

Overview
This set of tools will allow grassroots activists to better organize projects and campaigns and will also be useful to end-users working on almost any type or project. Existing tools for Drupal are lacking key features, often not very user-friendly, and almost never packaged for easy setup. I will address these problems by:

• Adding functionality to existing task tracking modules
• Creating the capacity for subgroups
• Allowing for discussion listservs to integrate seamlessly with groups
• Creating a module to plan, track, and document meetings

Description

Problems

After surveying 30+ activists regarding the largest challenges they face, I found that the majority need a project management tool for three things:

1. Holding volunteers accountable for tasks
2. A central place for all documents, spreadsheets, listservs and other tools
3. The ability to add and track members one time and have that reflected everywhere (orgination/project member lists, discussion listservs, wiki, etc).
   

There are many tools available in the Drupal community that provide parts of those solutions. For a variety of reasons, those tools are not sufficient:

1. Some of the features do not exist yet
2. Existing tools are not usable and intuitive
3. Existing tools do not come packaged for easy setup

For these reasons, most activists use Google Docs, Google Groups and Google Sites to organize their projects. When working on a campaign full-time, these tools become hard to maintain. These tools are very intuitive, but lack overarching organization and connectivity.

Solutions

What's needed is a project management tool that is feature-rich and intuitive/usable. Existing tools in the Drupal community largely address one or the other, but not both. I hope to address the three problems mentioned in the previous section as follows:

1. Features

• Task management needs to be focused on average users, not software developers. The tool needs to track not only the person/people executing the task, but also the person who is who holds them accountable for that task
• Members & Groups Most organizations have hierarchical structure and adding a person to a sub-group in reality usually means they need access to a variety of other information from the larger groups above them.
• Communication Discussion listservs are a key form of communication for most
  
• Meetings are abundant in the life of an activist. They need a tool to keep draft agendas and template agendas, store and search through notes, and convert "action items" from notes into tasks.

• Developing these tools for Drupal 7 address the majority of the usability issues because of all the UX work that has been done for Drupal 7. Additionally, modules developed for this project will be more intentional about creating an experience for users, not developers.
• I am seeking a usability experts to be a co-mentor (or advisor) for this project so I am able properly address usability issues with tools I am modifying, instead of just taking my best guess.
  

• Packaging all these tools up into multiple features that will allow for the maximum amount of added value for target users (activists and organizers).

To create this tool, I will modify/extend a couple modules and create a couple others. Ultimately, these tools will result in a set of features that have are configured with maximum connectivity to increase accessibility to new as well as existing Drupal installations.

... Groups.Drupal.org thinks my proposal is SPAM, so to read the rest of this proposal, visit my personal website