On 15 July, 100 UN staff from the Secretariat gathered to hear best practices in Drupal and Open Source and share their experiences and challenges with web-based projects. Participants were mostly from the Department for Public Information, the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the Department of Management.
One of the the global leads of the Drupal media initiative kicked off the day with a discussion on current best practices for media in D7 and the roadmap for D8. Drupal is an ideal platform for making your site multilingual. 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 & Empathy
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 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.”
"If you want to build the right thing for the right people for the right reason, you must test your assumptions."
All of the project’s code is currently 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.
Web Analytics
It is well known that web analytics should form part of the overall strategy of a website, as an indicator of its success. The accurate compilation and expert 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 analyzing and understanding the behavior of visitors allows for continuous improvement. Thanks to Google Analytics and Drupal, the ECLAC website relies 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 emphasized that 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.
Deploying and Managing Networks of Drupal Sites
Members of the Aegir Summit presented on aspects of Aegir, 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 the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory.
The National Democratic Institute used Aegir to host CiviParty (based on CiviCrm) 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:
- The NuCivic Data SaaS product, powered by DKAN, provides the same cloud workflow features as commercial hosting companies but as open source, making it cost effective to host customer data centers.
- Terra is 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, and an open data platform for the government of Sierra Leone were created with these tools.
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