NGOs, get Drupal working for YOU!

“Drupal for NGOs” is the bi-monthly bash held at Amnesty International in London and as the title suggests, it’s all about encouraging NGOs to harness Drupal powa!

There were 3 presentations interspersed with plenty of friendly banter, wine and nibbles. The focus? Creating powerful intranets with Drupal.

First up, Robert Castelo of Code Positive gave an informative “Introduction to Drupal” talk laying down the foundations and getting everyone up to speed on what Drupal is and what it does.

Joe Baker of Oxfam continued with a talk about the projects he’s working on at Oxfam and in particular about the challenges they’re facing regarding their intranet. He also mentioned he’d attended the Lullabot Do it with Drupal conference where Angie Byron (webchick) had built Basecamp using Drupal in a weekend, the resulting project code can be downloaded and a demo seen at http://www.doitwithdrupal.com/sessions/basecamp-built-drupal. Joe concluded by explaining that he was using that code as a base from which to develop an intranet for Oxfam India.

I particularly enjoyed Joe’s talk, it was really good to actually meet him in the actual flesh, actually face to face as we'd been chatting over Skype for the best part of 2 years...

Headlining the event was John King who had driven a staggering 7 hours to tell us about Skip which had recently moved to Drupal with the aim of organising it’s infrastructure and to aid communications. John explained that most of the Skip volunteers were away working on their summer projects but that the site would really start to get used once they returned.

There was a poignant moment at the end of John’s presentation, the Skip site had been developed by Fintan Darragh who had tragically passed away in May. John paid tribute to his work and thanks to pledges of ongoing support and hosting from the Drupal community, it was clear that Skip’s site would continue to go from strength to strength.

So all in all a thoroughly terrific evening with hot hints and top tips on how build effective intranets. Keep an eye on things at http://drupal.org.uk, or better still, sign up to notifications at http://drupal.org.uk/events/drupal-ngos

Photo by Mori Sugimoto, see more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/diasporan/sets/72157620505206109