On 15 July, 100 UN staff from the Department for Public Information, the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the Department of Management gathered to hear best practices in Drupal and Open Source from projects happening in the Secretariat and share their experiences and challenges with web-based projects.
There are many reasons for making your site multilingual and Drupal is an ideal platform for doing this. Drupal core includes the fundamentals for a multilingual site, while extended functionality is added via modules.The talk on Multilingual Strategy and Management presented the types of sites that may need translations, issues that may be encountered for each type as well as strategies for translation.
Humanitarian.ID
In partnership with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Phase2 designed and built Humanitarian.ID; a crisis contact management system which is alleviating many long-standing coordination problems plaguing disaster relief efforts in the Philippines, Vanuatu, and Nepal with plans to continue the roll-out in more crises.
This fully responsive, API-driven, application was designed from the ground up for a streamlined, universal user experience and peak performance in trying environments. The process began with a user-centered approach, with a particular focus on building empathy.
“You can’t replace your perspective, you can only find ways to identify with other people...You cannot speak for your user."
The Humanitarian.ID team stressed the importance of testing, identifying failure, and iterating, because “planning to get it right the first time is planning to fail.” He also explained that if you want to build the right thing for the right people for the right reason, you must test your assumptions. Creativity is born from asking diverse people hard questions, such as: “For whom will it provide value? Am I going to annoy the people I’m trying to help?”
The project’s code is currently open source and available on Github.
Open Atrium
Open Atrium is a powerful distribution of Drupal that provides reusable, flexible components to support collaboration and knowledge management. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee(IASC) is a consortium of NGOs and the UN who set policy and strategy for how humanitarian response happens at the high level. This session showed how switching to Open Atrium took IASC from a static site with a bottleneck of one or two people managing content to a full-service platform supporting autonomous content management and group ownership of site section layouts and content access control. The use case that was accomplished involved collaborating, sharing, and managing documents and meetings-- a common use case across the various UN agencies and departments. The session also included an interactive and discussion-based portion for participants to discuss their collaboration needs and whether a platform like Open Atrium could support business requirements and processes.
Slides are here, and if you’d like to submit comments on how you collaborate, here’s a survey that was circulated.
The accurate compilation and analysis of data enables corporate decision-making to enhance your organization’s visibility and projection. In the case of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), to measure the results of our actions and the behavior of users through our network of websites, it was essential to set targets beforehand. Measurement is important because analysing and understanding the behaviour of visitors allows for continuous improvement. Thanks to Google Analytics and Drupal, theECLAC websiterelies on reliable, segmented and comparable metrics, which provide a powerful feedback channel with strategic relevance. Some techniques they used were: tokens to segment taxonomies of content classification; content grouping according to Drupal content types; event tracking for documents downloaded; filtering views for different sites; and preparing accurate reports and dashboards.The speaker emphasizedthat web communication is not one-way (sender-receiver) as is the case with traditional media, which are also based on highly imprecise user statistics. On websites and in social media, user behaviors can be measured through many indicators. When these indicators are cross-checked, they can provide a clear overview for thinking about an organization's digital content strategies.
Members of theAegir Summitpresented on aspects ofAegir, a free software Drupal hosting system used by organizations requiring operational freedom, information security, and self-hosting. The session began with the history of Aegir and example users such as the European Commission and theStanford National Accelerator Laboratory.TheNational Democratic Instituteused Aegir to hostCiviParty(based onCiviCrm) to promote international parliamentary democracy. Previously, these tools were available only to large political campaigns; now small organizations anywhere in the world can tap into the power of organizing data. TheNuCivic DataSaaS product, powered byDKAN, provides the same cloud workflow features as commercial hosting companies but as open source, making it cost effective to host customer data centers.Terrais a container management tool created to make launching sites with Docker as simple as possible.EbolaData, a community space to share open data about the ebola virus, andan open data platform for the government of Sierra Leonewere created with these tools. Slides (in keynote) arehere.
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