So here is where we are on this. We have meet as a team to go over the basic plan. Preliminarily we are looking at Joomla, but are open to looking at other tools.

We need to list the web-features we are looking for. Ill start:

A contact management system that lets people create individual accounts and join different groups. For example, an Ambassador may be a member of a local group as well as a national or special topic group

Calendars - both community wide and for each groups.

Forums - both community wide and for each groups.

Newsfeeds - mostly created by TEN but members and groups should be able to have publishing permissions.

Blogs/Wikis - we need at least one blog we will run, but like the idea of having group wikis and or blogs for each local or topic group.

Project Management - It would be nice to have groups be able to manage their projects.

Training - We see this also as the site that we would use to push training videos. It would be nice if we could also administer tests - one idea we had is give Ambassadors ranks that are based in part on how much training they have received.

"Ask Alisha" - we thought it would be nice to have an area, not a forum, where any Ambassador could ask questions openly for TEN to answer.

Maps - I would love to see a mashup that had one color pins for places we have had events, and another color pin for local Ambassadors - Including the local club info.

Group Management tools? What tools will help a local group manage themseleves that we have not discussed? Member lists? Suggestion box?

this is just a start

Does anyone have a list of other sites that do some of what we want to do that we should look at for guidance?

Oh - one other thing - we also want this community to include our partners. That is, we want to be able to create links and mentorship opportunities between the survivors and NGOs and our Ambassadors.

John,

Do you have a web site yet that shows how your retail stores support individuals and NGOs that work in this sphere? If so, what's the link?

I lead the Tutor/Mentor Connection, and support a network of individual organizations who are individual tutor/mentor organizations in Chicago, or organizations that support them (the infrastructure). I use maps to show where these organizations are and try to find other partners who will innovate their own ways to draw attention to these groups, and provide a more consistent, and distributed, flow of volunteers and/or dollars. The site is http://www.tutormentorconnection.org and I think you might be able to apply some of our own thinking to your efforts.

As to a content and network management system, are you aware that the Omidyar.net site is open source. That means that any organization could duplicate every feature in this site, in creating a new site focused on their own vision.

In different places you can read about suggestions for improving this site. By copying the site entirely, you or any other organization could build those enhancements into your own new site, thus learning from this one, and innovating improvements.

In the Links Library of my site I poste links to many other sites, including sites that focus on collaboration, creativity, innovation and knowledge management. I do this to illustrate the ideas I'm trying to incorporate into my own work, which I cannot do without volunteers or donors to help, and to provide ideas that other tutor/mentor leaders can draw from to imrove their own work.

Thus, if you build a web site, I encourage you to also create a links section, where you would put links to sites of organizations that you feel do the best work of connecting a network of thousands of people. By aggregating these in one place, your team is more likely to draw from these ideas in finding a solution to the problems you're dealing with now, or in the future.

Good luck to you. Your work is important. Finding ways to create streams of consistent reveneue for NGOs and social benefit organizations is a way to assure that they can do more effective work.

So, I'm Andy. what I am going to spend the next few days doing is to bring up a TEN account and Joomla on a Plesk server I operate and get familiar with it. As John mentions, we're not wed to Joomla yet, so we've got a little time to explore.

Content management systems are a bit new to me but I have a task at work to work with a team to migrate a plone site to a "nicer" front end and better organization so I'm going to be learning about CMS systems quickly. I can also use advice from those of you who do work with CMS systems and can offer me shortcuts to understanding what is going to work well for this application.

2 first tasks for us methinks:

1 - build a list of urls of sites we can all visit and look at, individually documenting what we like and dislike about each.

2 - start building a list of our functional requirements for the site (using John's list as a starting place).

What is the best way to build and collaboratively edit lists like these on Onet?

Hey guys, John I really like all the ideas you have so far for the content of the future community management. Some others I'd maybe add/develop:

Ambassador of the Month - to honor the top fund raiser, and we can showcase where they're from/events they've hosted, etc.

Photos - can set it up so ambassadors/members upload pictures from their events?

Fund raising chart - when there's an "urgent need" from one of our partner, we can have a chart showing how much we've raised and how far to go.

I created a workspace here : http://www.omidyar.net/group/ten/ws/TEN%20Community%20Management%20Plan/?e=newpage

Daniel,

One of our partners, Apne Aap, has specificly requested that we create some kind of online mentoring program. We are also starting a sponsorship program to get their kids in school. Ill look at your site and links.

hi john and andy! given all that you want to do in terms of community management, i have to recommend against joomla and put in a plug for drupal, specifically the civicspaceondemand implementation of it.

Here is why:

• Joomla isn't going to give you the kind of group support, moderation that you want
• Drupal is made to do that.
• Drupal can be augmented with the incredible CiviCRM developed by David Geilhufe and other O.net members
• There is a much larger Drupal development community, always adding and testing new modules including things like ecommerce.

In a nutshell, Joomla is an excellent content management system; it is not robust enough to build online communities IMHO.

Check out civicspaceondemand.

[Edited for clarity]

thanks Lars. Ive added it to our workspace and will look at it more detail.

One idea that I had was that we should have an interactive education area that includes general facts about trafficking and an outlining of the global problem, the size and scope, definitions, causes, int'l and domestic legal structures and intiatives. Then our site would demonstrate how TEN's approach has been successful at combatting trafficking. Here we would focus on our NGO partners and educate people on specific details of how our NGOs operate, who they serve, their size, location, and possibly how they could expand. We could show pictures and provide links here for communication with our partners. Ambassadors' roles should be defined clearly, as well as the opportunities that exist for Ambassadors. People who want to be Ambassadors are likely to fit into that category of people who learn about trafficking and decide they want to do something to help. We at TEN need to figure out other ways that they can help. Maybe there are more tasks that we can assign to Ambassadors in order to lessen the burden on TEN's regular employees, especially in the field of raising awareness. There should be an area of the site that details all sorts of functions that Ambassadors could choose from in order to be more involved. An incentive for top performance could be to be an invitation to join the TEN team on a trip to one of our NGO partners overseas.

Excellent. Just the type of feedback (shortcut) I'd been hoping for Lars. Switching gears to Drupal unless I hear otherwise from John... --Andy

Quick question Lars, Would you recommend that I start with the CivicSpace opensource download instead of starting from scratch with Drupal? --Andy

yes, it provides an easy install script, some basic templates, and a core set of useful modules. at the same time, contact david about the hosted version, which will provide you with some support and security updates, etc. i think it will come with civicCRM too. contact david geilhufe for more info.

Andrew Maffei said:

Quick question Lars, Would you recommend that I start with the CivicSpace opensource download instead of starting from scratch with Drupal? --Andy

Hello all. If you want to "Do It Yourself":

1. Don't use the CivicSpace download-- download Drupal 5.0 (www.drupal.org) + CiviCRM (www.civicrm.org) + any modules you want and install them on your own server.
2. Try CivicSpace On Demand (www.civicspacelabs.org/services_main) to get all the latest CivicSpace technology through your web browser in minutes by filling out a three-page form.

CivicSpace itself, CivicSpace associates and other consultants can help you in creating a website (for a fee). Some of CivicSpace's recent projects include an arts community where Artists can recruit supporters and patrons can support artists with small donations. We also did a grassroots journalism site for Chicago neighborhoods.

Feel free to send me any questions.

David -

Thanks for your feedback. It's nice to know you're out there and your suggestions are right on.

Got though most of path a) and then realized that I need to upgrade my server to run the civicrm software. It runs drupal fine but needs a newer php for civicrm I think. Time to upgrade the server anyway, so I'm gonna do that first.

In the meantime I've created a civicrm account for myself (following path b)) and am checking it out.

Thanks again. Back to you soon for more advice I'm sure.

--Andy

I was looking at some Drupal modules. I like the sounds of:

ChipIn module

The Drupal ChipIn module enables users to insert a ChipIn widget which enables group money collection for any purpose. The ChipIn widget is a small indicator of the progress of your event that you can add to your Web pages.

Embed filter

Many great sites like YouTube, iFilm and NowPublic allow their media assets to be served to 3rd party websites (like this one). They usually offer snippets of code to be embedded in a web page that will then load a media object (usually Flash) from their servers. This module lets your site users embed such snippets into posts but gives you the power to decide which hosts to trust.

Flash gallery

This module (originally created by DriesK) is an alternative way of displaying your photo albums using Flash, inside a Drupal environment.

Flash gallery module depends on image module and image gallery module. It takes existing images and galleries, prepares a custom xml-feed from them, and injects the feed into an embedded Flash file.

Flickr

Access photos on Flickr's site via their API. The module provides a filter for inserting photos and photosets and blocks for a user's recent photos and photosets.

abber

This module is (and will increasingly in the future) be the home for Drupal & Jabber integration.

Map module

Map module provides 3 main components:

• A new node type "map". Each map is basically a google map.
• A tinymce plugin with a map selector.
• A filter so you can insert the created map in your nodes.

Meez Integration

This module provides integration with the Meez avatar/profile site. Meez is a system for creating a centralized avatar that you can use on multiple sites.

Chat Room

This module enables chat rooms to be set up in Drupal 4.7 sites. No additional software is required. Chat Room uses AJAX to update the chat without reloading the page. Chat rooms are displayed as nodes. This module does not support pop-up windows or invitations.

Buddylist

Allows you to add other site users to your buddy list, organize these into groups, and monitor their content. It is a basic building block for anyone wishing to make a social networking site in Drupal.

Community Tags

Allows members of the community to tag other users' content, and can use the Tagedlic module to show a "tag cloud" for a node based on popularity of tags.

Event with volunteer time slots

This module requires the event module and defines a new event-enabled node type "event with volunteer time slots". Site users can sign up for particular times, and event organizers (and those with the admin permission) can also add users to or remove users from the schedule.

MySite

MySite pages are designed to let users create a personalized summary of the site. As such, the MySite module duplicates the functionality of tools like MyYahoo! and Google's personalized homepage.

Organic groups

Enable users to create and manage their own 'groups'. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves.

OG Calendar

This module provides each group with a calendar showing only the group's events.

OG Forum

Creates a forum per organic group and restricts viewing forum nodes by group membership.

Countdown

Adds a block titled "Countdown" to count the days, hours, minutes, and seconds since or until a specified event. Can configure to just show days, or days and hours, etc.

Event with volunteer time slots

This module requires the event module and defines a new event-enabled node type "event with volunteer time slots". Site users can sign up for particular times, and event organizers (and those with the admin permission) can also add users to or remove users from the schedule.

EventFinder

EventFinder is a means of searching a Drupal site for events based on event type, geographic location, and proximity to major metropolitan area. Search criteria can be saved and new matches can be emailed to registered users. EventFinder allows users to register for events and for event hosts to download lists of these people. Features a My Events screen listing all of the events a user has registered for and agreed to host via the site.

Remindme

A module that reminds users of upcoming events. They can choose to subscribe to individual events or events that have a taxonomy term assigned to them.

RSVP

RSVP lets users invite people to attend an event.

So, thanks to Andrew, we have the Drupal wih civicrm tools up and running. I have rebuild all our existing site on the test server - which took all of about 2 hours. It is a very easy program to work with.

Two questions: I find working with content not to be a problem, but we desperately need a better template. I could, and probably will, try downloading some of the free ones. But are there affordable designers that can just make the template. If we find a designer we like that does not know drupal, is it easy enough for them to make a template or is that a big learning curve.

The next big challenge for us is to get the civiCRM stuff to link to other tools we need to install. It is a very well built and flexible program, but it was designed for a different purpose than ours so only testing will tell if we can do most of what we want with it.

Ok - the we have made the first step in getting this live in that we have changed our http://madebysurvivors.com/ website to a new Drupal based system we will be building the community management tools on top of.

Right now this is a work in progress and we need your help. At this point we need help with the basic functionality and design, and we will be adding the community management features after we get the basics working. This is a live site and a development site at the same time. I know that is not ideal, but we really needed to get new content up and the old HTML based site was too hard to work with.

Here is what we need.

Basic User Feedback. There is a lot of content not yet up and a lot of empty placeholders, but we need folks to look around and tell us what we should add and fix. There is a discussion forum on the site and it would be helpful if you could register and leave any comments there. It would also be helpful if you used the other parts of the discussion forum to ask any other questions you may have so we can get some content in there about TEN.

Design. This is basic drupal template. WE have no inhouse design skills and we need to do a lot to make this better. We are adding a lot of pictures and video, but there are basic layout problems we need to improve as well. If you know anyone who might be able to modify the template for us, that would be very helpful. Also -we can add flash splash pages, etc, but don't have those skills either.

Thanks in advance for your help.

John Berger said:

Ok - the we have made the first step in getting this live in that we have changed our http://madebysurvivors.com/

John looks great at first glance but definitely needs more pix as you already know! I tried to sign up as a user but it seems you need to approve me. Kind of odd since it sent me a one time log-in link to click on and when I did it said access denied. I hope that's not a permanent feature!

Hmm - should be automatic - thanks for identifying that.

ok- that should be fixed now. Thanks.