Drupal for NGOs - first ever meet yesterday

Yesterday Neal, Tom and I wandered to London, where Rob Purdie was hosting the first ever Drupal for NGOs meeting at Amnesty International’s UK headquarters. It was a hot, dry evening, and Neal’s attempts to Brompton it over from Marylebone left him dry-mouthed enough to avoid the copious snacks that Rob and others had laid on for us.

It was clear after the first half hour or so that there were going to be far more people there than Rob had expected: I think in the end there were around 50 to 60 attendees. A brief, slightly confusing “speed-dating” session later, I also realised that there was a real cross-section of Drupal fans there. There were freelance theme developers, module coders, hardcore sysadmins, CSSers, end users, tech writers, Drupal beginners…. A well-rounded audience, that hopefully stopped the meeting being too focussed on one layer of the CMS.

The talk from Tracy Frauzel at Greenpeace, about their experience with Drupal, was really enlightening, as was the phoned-in discussion from Joel Bassuk of Oxfam International (new site going live, 3–4 weeks’ time). It’s good to hear of people enjoying their transition from other systems to Drupal (even if the imports tend—like all data imports—to be occasionally painful).

It was also interesting to see how far people would tend to go with contributed modules, tweaking the theme and hammering away at the admin config, rather than building their own modules or (shudder) hacking core. Oxfam’s experience with forking Plone shows the perils of hacking core; to avoid doing that in Drupal, Greenpeace had used the usual locale hack to translate core strings to their liking (I say “usual”: I hadn’t seen it in the wild before, so again it was nice to hear a success story).

I really look forward to where Drupal for NGOs will go from here—maybe collaborative/accretive online conversations and resources, but most importantly the next event. This one was a really smooth first event, and it bodes well for future ones. From my experiences with the OGNs, I’ve learnt that organizing a fairly straightforward event can be incredibly stressful, and when it all works perfectly then nobody notices all the effort you’re making: that’s sort of the point of the effort, but it’s incredibly infuriating that people think you’re kicking back and feeling chilled! All the contributors, everyone who spoke or who volunteered some information, contributed to a great evening. Cheers, everyone.