CommunityNI live

www.communityni.org is live.

Background

Communityni.org Version 1 has been running since 2005 and has been attracting increasing numbers of visitors - currently an average of 1,200 visits per day.   People have been posting jobs, events & news consistently over the years but as the popularity of the site increased so too did the burden of centralised ongoing editing, management and support for users.   Worse still, users had no control over their content once it was posted. The proprietary content management system was becoming a barrier in terms of improving efficiency, giving control to users and plugging into the social media revolution. Radical change was needed.   For some time we have been watching the rise of social networking tools such as facebook, myspace, and the incredibly popular twitter.   These tools are fantastic for community organising and networking - we started to consider how we could harness the social networking groundswell for our friends and colleagues in the voluntary and community sector. A new content management system and targeting of effort was needed.

New foundations - using Drupal

Well over a year ago the ICT team at NICVA began a process of developing new sites and redeveloping our existing ones on the Drupal open source content management system - free to download, modify and use. Drupal is a flexible content management system that has a worldwide development community - passionate, hard working and mostly contributing their work on a voluntary basis. Thousands of third sector activists are using Drupal and private sector businesses such as Sony BMG, MTV, Popular Science and Warner Brothers have recognised the benefits of the open source development movement. In our case it just wouldn't be possible to develop and offer the range of online resources that we do without the collective effort of the open source development community and in particular the Drupal community. Basically it works like this - you need the content management to do something that it doesn't do "out of the box" - chances are that someone else has had the same need and has developed a solution. There are thousands of contributed modules to add extra functionality to Drupal core and they are all listed on the Drupal site. The version control, issue queues, patch releases and general support and guidance are all well organised and managed by thousands of dedicated maintainers and testers. The Drupal community is an excellent example of what collective effort and action can achieve.

Planning and Research

The planning and development process for communityni.org was and is organic - website development projects need to be flexible and agile.  To begin with we analysed the usage of communityni version one to see what people were actually doing on the site. In addition, we kept a close eye on the general trends in the social media sphere to identify what functionality people have come to expect in online networking. Research into trends of how people participate in social media helped to define the type of engagement we could expect in a Northern Ireland context. Lastly we explored and tested what features we could implement reliably using Drupal.

Prototype presentation

We have found that the best way to build a site using Drupal is to develop a working prototype. A prototype helps when trying to explain concepts or demonstrate functionality possibilities to other stakeholders. We presented social media research data and a working site prototype to NICVA's Unit Heads team achieving a general agreement on the concept. The key new features that were proposed were around improved efficiencies and social networking concepts such as individual profiles and groups.

Alpha site development

Next step was to develop the prototype further. With a lot of drawing on whiteboards, sketching out page layouts, defining functionality, testing modules and debate and discussion we arrived at a clearer vision of what the site would offer and how it would function.

Content migration

We wanted to migrate as much of the content from version one as possible. There were thousands of articles and over 5,000 organisation details listed. It would have been a shame to lose articles that organisations had contributed since the launch of version one.  The migration process was tested showing that the whole process would take just over two full days. The process involved building database tables that matched the structure in Drupal and then importing them. We started the actual migration the week before launch. A further process of identifying key gaps in content will be carried out over the coming weeks with the NICVA communications team and other key stakeholders.

Bringing it all together

For around two weeks before launch we kept a daily snaglist on a whiteboard. Each morning we would write up a new snaglist and have a quick discussion around any problem areas. Web development needs to be agile - despite thorough testing of all of the components we would need there were still problems putting them together. We had to make fast decisions about functionality and approach many times during the final flurry. Compromise was necessary on some functionality but in the main we stuck to the original vision.

Launch

We launched version two on 17 June 2009. 

We worked at a frenetic pace to get the site live and so far so good. We still have a significant snaglist to deal with and would expect users to raise new issues that we haven't come across.

Future development

We have added the communityni User Group to give a place for users to discuss the development of the site and to give notice about any changes we're planning.

We hope you find communityni useful, easy to use and that you'll participate in shaping the future of the site using this group.

Please feel free to ask questions about the process using the comment form.

Other website development from the NICVA team

So far we've ported the following sites to drupal;

• www.grant-tracker.org - NI focused fundraising news, resources and fund database.
• www.communitybuyer.org - Procurement support site with suppliers database and guidance
• www.diycommitteeguide.org - extensive resources for effective organisational governance. Ongoing management by Volunteer Development Agency

In addition we developed two new sites

• www.communityleadershipprogramme.org - supporting the IFI funded community leadership programme
• www.fundingpoint.ie - Grant tracker with a focus on the Republic of Ireland. Managed by the wheel.

References
Drupal: www.drupal.org
Open Source Software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software