Notes from Drupal for NGOs/non-profits meetup at DrupalCon Copenhagen

We had a semi-formal meetup or Birds of a Feather (BOF) gathering at DrupalCon Copenhagen. The idea was for it to be a bit like our experience of the Drupal for NGOs group in the UK. We wanted to try to help people from NGOs, or those working on their behalf, chat together and maybe help each other out with hints, tips and experience (more info on the scheduled BOF item for what we were up to.)

After everyone introduced themselves and said what they did, we tried to get an idea of all the different problems people were encountering, without digging too deeply into any one solution. Then we went round the problems and tried to work out how other people had solved them.

The following notes aren't a complete transcript, but they should give an idea of who attended and what the problems were. I've also put a few "open items" at the end that people might want to like to pursue. Hopefully this should be useful in getting people together on subjects where there's mutual benefit. If there are any corrections or additions please feel free to post them below as comments. Not sure if I can edit discussions once they've been added to g.d.o but at least there'll be a record in the comments.

Attendees

Mike Haggerty & Stuart Broz, Trellon

Work w/NGOs, based in Washington DC

Steve Kessler, Denver Dataman

Works with small non-profits

Jean-Baptiste Ingold, Drupal evangelist

Working w/NGOs, organising events in France

Benjamin Christensen, Cyberhus.dk (Danish Youthnet)

Wants to work more with volunteers

Viggo Degnbol, IBIS

NGO thinking about switching to Drupal

Peter Stumpf, United Nations SPIDER

Helping countries in disaster areas with space technology

Sofian Benaissa, Koumbit

Non-profit shop in Montreal. Providing training tools and tech solutions.

Joe Baker, Oxfam International

80 of 5000 people, legally independent bits. Plone->Drupal: Quebec, India, Germany

Reinier Battenberg, Mountbatten

Uganda w/UNICEF. No big problems w/Drupal!

Allie Micka & Barry Madore, Advantage Labs

Non-profit clients, needs include donations, managing local support, tool-building tools

Lotte, Mads & Jasper [I can't find links for these!], Danish Guide & Scout Association

New to Drupal, with volunteer developers and decision makers: what to do?

Issues

Risk

• Rewriting frameworks
• Distributions like OpenAtrium not being "standard"
• Lots of media solutions

Volunteers

• Getting them!
• Volunteer developers
• Info from the volunteers
• Big website
• Casual workers
• Managing distributed teams
• Process

Solutions: groups.drupal.org, advertise freedom as a plus, weekly real-life meetings, subversion clarity, tools like Trac & Basecamp, Trellon cd provide best practice, Aegir?

CRM solutions

• Niche users
• Documentation
• Code quality
• ROI of development

Solution: BOF on Drupal CRM tbc.

Donations

• Crowd funding
• Petitions
• Server tools
• Payment API

Solutions: "Pay" module, Democracy in Action, Activism module, Activism Online

Open data

• Pressure to make transparent
• Publish donations and beneficiaries

Small non-profits

• Expectations

Solutions: rings/tiers of service, clear service levels, create a user group for free support, communities and good practice, retainer with extra lab or training sessions.

Further information

• The Drupal CRM BOF met later that week, and there was a further meeting during the code sprint. Please sign up to the crm-api group on g.d.o if
  you're interested in getting involved.
• Mike from Trellon mentioned he might have some notes on best practices for tracking development within loose, distributed NGO volunteer teams. It'd be great if we could have a link to them.
• We were never really able to help the Danish Scouts & Guides Association with their wider volunteering issues. If anyone's any contact information for them, then please get them to come over here and maybe join this g.d.o group and maybe hook up with similar non-profits elsewhere!