The team will be meeting TODAY as per our regular monthly meeting schedule. All meetings are open to anyone who wishes to join us. We will meet on Skype. If we don't have your Skype contact and you want to join, pop in Nabuur Chat and we can coordinate adding you to the meeting from there.

Hope to see you then!

Jennifer

Did the team meet? Are there any notes?

Sorry I couldn't make it.

--
David Bale

We had the meeting as scheduled. It was just Rolf and I this month - many people were away, but all of us agree we need to keep to a consistent meeting schedule. Rolf is planning to post an update for this month's meeting as most of the updating was on his end. It will be much easier for him to summarize than for me. He is also getting ready to leave for vacation, so I'm sure he'll update as soon as he can.

Jennifer

Thanks, Jennifer. I found that I was able to read your conversation on Skype. I was pleased to see that ideas about collaborations and mergers are being discussed. I think that is the best way forward. I'd still like to offer some help, but the set-up of the site here appears to make this quite difficult to do - any suggestions?

David

--
David Bale

Hi David-

I'm not sure what kind of help you are wanting to offer or what kind of trouble you are having with the website, so I'm not sure how to exactly respond.

At this point, it looks like maybe Rolf is not going to be able to post the update on Sunday's meeting before he leaves on vacation. I hate to comment further without the entire community having been updated on what was discussed yet. Everything we talked about on Sunday is all in the very preliminary discussion stages - no decisions have been made, all these things are ideas that we think have potential to allow for greater collaboration between Nabuur & 1% Club.

As I said in my previous post, I am not comfortable updating on this meeting because we discussed a meeting that Rolf took part in with the 1% Club (in person). Since he was there - I think we need to allow him time to update. There's a lot of people away right now or in the process of leaving on vacation, it's just a busy time of year, so I'm sorry for the delay.

Jennifer

In earlier discussions, 1%CLUB has been mentioned as another platform that may be suitable for NABUUR villages and projects. Pelle and I have had conversations with them in the past, and we were both part of the group of founding organisations of what now is the Open for Change network.

So far,1%CLUB has been successful as a fundraising platform, and in organising"co-creation" sessions around projects. They've started working with "project coaches" and want to enable people to volunteer as well.

I currently work with 1%CLUB, to help with a new web technology strategy, and rethinking how their platform could work in today's world of social networks and micro-volunteering platforms.

In a way, it's similar to Nabuur's transformation a couple of years ago: hire in-house developers, rebuild from scratch, rethink the essence of what you offer in relation to your mission.

It's a great opportunity to bring in our lessons and insights, and of course the online landscape has changed quite a bit in the last years: things like twitter, sparked, ushahidi, open data, and cloud computing came to the scene.

It also helps me develop my thinking on the future of Nabuur: how are we different, and what should we do?

At the core, both 1%club and Nabuur try to combine "volunteer projects and tasks" with a "social community". In contrast to local activities, the community members are not able to come together off-line, and in contrast to other online communities, the projects and tasks are off-line.

The idea is to take a more radical approach to tapping into existing networks and platforms:

- social: facebook, linkedin, etc
- tasks: UNV, sparked, etc
- fundraising: globalgiving, etc

The website will be just a thin layer pulling information together, and much less attempt to be a "destination
site".

That also means the "real core" of people driving it will be small, and many people contributing may be hardly aware of the site, but instead do things in their social network.

We looked at the "branding" of 1%CLUB, which is more than just the functional aspect (which could be as sketched above).

To "feel part of" either 1%CLUB or Nabuur also entails other aspects:

- the social aspect: what kind of community are you in?
- the mental aspect: what do you want to do, learn, become better at
- the "spiritual" or "worldly" aspect: what type of world does it stand for?

Thinking through all four of those "dimensions" helps make clearer choices for target audiences, style, etc

There may be overlap in some of those with NABUUR (especially the functional part) and perhaps not in others.

So yes, perhaps there is room for a "NABUUR brand" next to a "1%CLUB brand" based on very similar software and
volunteer practices. And perhaps it makes more sense to feed our
experiences into their setup.

That's an open question right now.

From a technical or functional perspective, it makes sense to try to work together. Our own tech capacity is too small to build "big things" right now, it would work better to contribute to a (new) project, focus on things we know well, and be part of a bigger ecosystem of organisations and products.

PS: I've typed this summary on my phone while on a bus... Starting a redesign from the perspective of a phone user was also suggested for 1%club, it will definitely change how to do things...
PS2: I'll be off-line for about a week, and not sure how soon I'll be able to catch up after that. Looking forward to your responses!

Hi Rolf

Thanks for the information, and enjoy your break :)

When you return, please can you explain a little more about what this could mean in practical terms for the Nabuur villages and online volunteers? For example, whether you see a way forward for Nabuur in its current form as an organisation (and if so what that way forward is, and how we will get there), or whether you see villages moving onto a new 1% Club (or other) site, or something else?

Its nearly a year since the handover to the new board, so we need to get from 'questions' to 'answers'!

Mary

hi friend great to be part of you i joined this website but i neet some help

Hi volunteers

lets join hands to solve problems. Nabuur is among the great organization I have ever come across on the net.The organizational decision to help eliminate poverty among rural communities in some part of the world.Nabuur is not well known among the youth as a research I conducted in my country Ghana.Nabuur communication compared to other social network is weak and need to be improved.I am doing my part so must all volunteers in this site.Concerning the purpose of this site, I think it is making it to the top .

Daniel

Hi - we'd be happy to help guide you on how to use Nabuur. You can send a message to me at jennifer@nabuur.com or here on the site with your questions.

Kind regards-

Jennifer

Hello Pelle

Hope all is well with u as u go for your holiday,i too would like to wish u the best of luck during your summer holiday as you relax yr mind after a hard work.Bigup to u and well done

We will see fun of nabuur from the begining with the like of claudia,romina and so on.

Thanks
Enon Alex- Adyaka village

Hi,i thank you for your good heart of helping. so i wanted to guide me on how to register my village on nabuur and how to write aproposal.
wishing you happiness in life,
mugabi innocent.

Hi Mugabi Innocent

Nabuur is not currently registering any new communities. If you want to be notified when registration reopens, you can leave your email address at http://www.nabuur.com/en/assistance-your-community

So unfortunately we cannot assist your group at the moment, and you cannot use the site to find online volunteers for your project.

However, you are welcome to use the site as an online volunteer. You will find that you can learn by sharing information and ideas with existing Nabuur villages, including several in Uganda. For more information, have a look at the Villages or Volunteer Opportunities pages. You can also access common-interest groups via the Groups page.

There are lots of guides out there on how to write proposals - check out
Community Toolbox http://ctb.ku.edu/en
and the Resources section of http://www.fundsforngos.org

Hope that helps!

Mary

thank you for your help and advise you gave me may GOD award you what you need in life.
am very happy to join Nabuur friends across the world.as soon as my village is registered,i will need your co-operation and guide in order to develop my village so that it can look like others in the world.
i wish you the best
mugabi innocent

Dear all,

During our last governance meeting we discussed the steps forward for NABUUR again. We concluded that in the past year we have discussed the same issues a number of times, but until now have failed to put them into practice.

Following the meeting I’ve written up my thoughts on how we could ‘get NABUUR going’ again.

In order to make NABUUR a more lively place, I think we need to better show what can be found on NABUUR:
- Concrete volunteer opportunities
- Stories from villages, about who they are and what their day-to-day life looks like AND of course what they are working on and what they achieved (through NABUUR)

We can use these inspiring stories & volunteer opportunities to attract new volunteers. At the same time we need to make sure that interested people don’t get lost, that they
- Can find the right stories and volunteer opportunities on our site
- Can get some guidance on how NABUUR/website works
- Have a place/person to go to in case of questions
- And hopefully feel empowered to take up more responsibilities (tasks, become a facilitator, etc..)

We should closely monitor what happens: what works and what still needs improvement. That way we can feed our experiences into the development of the site and support tools. Working with more volunteers should also give us insight in if the proposed governance model will work.

Website development
Somehow we’ll need to better show the relevant stories and tasks on nabuur.com or a new nabuur.org. I can imagine a few scenarios but need to discuss them with the tech team. More on that soon. (I will be meeting Rolf on Wednesday)

Governance
Regarding the governance model there is also some work to be done/decisions to be made. During two governance meetings we’ve had discussions about the proposed governance model. There have been doubts if the model will work, especially if there are enough people to fill all the roles. I suggest we draw a second picture of how we’re organized now, and jointly try to fill in the gaps we see.

Sponsoring model
Accidentally, I’ll be running 10 km on the 25th of September. I could use this opportunity to start raising funds for NABUUR. This could also be the start of a broader campaign around NABUUR’s 10th anniversary, where we invite (potential) sponsors, partners, friends and loved ones to see NABUUR through the next years. Not only financially (for hosting etc), but also with partnerships that benefit the local communities.

NABUUR’s 10th anniversary
Jennifer has been gathering ideas for celebrating the 10th anniversary
1. Villages submit stories about where they were before joining Nabuur and where they are today noting achievements made since joining Nabuur.
2. Photographs could be submitted from activities and projects organized.
3. Organize and publish a Nabuur magazine.
4. Nabuur t-shirts to be sold for fundraising in Kiserian, Kenya.
5. Nabuur caps could be printed and sold for fundraising.
6. Planting a tree in honor of the anniversary.
7. Nabuur awards could be arranged and given out (this idea came from the Nabuur Board).
8. Another idea is perhaps arranging for a program on Blogtalk radio - Pelle has been interviewed before for Nabuur, perhaps he could be joined by a few local representatives to talk about the 10th anniversary.

The actual anniversary is on the 30th of October, which gives us less than 2 months to prepare. Personally, I’ve started collecting stories from previous years (from the NABUUR archive). If we could combine these stories from the past with some recent stories from villages, I think we should be able to turn that into a nice visual presentation (online) of what NABUUR is about. This presentation can then also be used for further fundraising/partnerships.

Of course we won’t be able to do everything at once. I've put together a document with a first, rough planning + a list of activities that I can think of. I’m pretty sure it’s not complete, but I hope it provides a good start.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IkNw08qvidJtZ74PY9CK7BW0SAfmE92cifgh...

Looking forward to hear your ideas,

Pelle