NABUUR News

NABUUR, the Global Neighbour Network, turned 10 today!
To celebrate this fact, we've put together a timeline with NABUUR milestones, newsletters, videos and stories from the ground - showing NABUUR's development over time.

Looking back, these 10 years have been a continuous journey of trying, testing, often failures, successes, but (hopefully) most of all learning. But also a journey with sometimes rather unbelievable stories of perseverance, ingenuity and collaboration to overcome local challenges.

Of course these results would never have been achieved without the support from volunteers all around the world. On behalf of all the communities that have benefited from your ideas and efforts, I'd like to say a heartfelt"Thank you!" for 10 years of your continuous support!

I hope you'll enjoy a walk down memory lane!

Pelle Aardema

Click here to open the timeline in full screen. (goes to an external site)

Today nabuur.com moved to a new server. As Jennifer wrote in her announcement: we took the opportunity to clean up some content. This serves two purposes:

• Volunteers will more easily find villages that are active.
• The website should work faster because there is less content to filter through.

If you're reading this message as a NABUUR volunteer or local representative, you hopefully find all your content still ok. We did our best to make sure all active villages and all neighbours are still available. (We have a backup copy of all previous content, so if you do miss something: get in touch!)

• The number of villages has been reduced from 235 to 93, and the villages that started but never finished their registration process have been removed too.
• The number of groups has been reduced (less dramatically).
• All user accounts have been moved to the new site. (We'll clean up unused accounts later on)
• We removed a few blocks of "related content" from various pages, to speed up page delivery: "neighbours who could help", "organisations of interest", and "similar villages".
• We've temporarily switched off Google Adwords, so there are less visitors to the site at the same time.

We also did house-keeping on some of the services we use to keep the organisation running:

• The documents archive is getting organised (on Google Docs) and has a public section that you can reach via https://bit.ly/nabuur-docs The meeting notes of our community chat sessions are on there.
• We also created a Google Calendar to share important events, such as upcoming community chats, the server move, and so on. If you're using an online calendar yourself, you can add our events to it, via https://bit.ly/nabuur-calendar
• We used to have a special site with documentation for developers. We've retrieved all the information from that site, and are going to publish that via for instance https://github.com/nabuur/nabuur-d5
• We have a (new) public tracker to share what we're working on: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/292585

All in all, we're happy with the results so far, and are looking forward to seeing the site run with its normal traffic. We'll continue to work on performance improvements and clean-up in the coming weeks.

This Friday, June 10th, the Nabuur community will be migrated to a brand new, but much smaller server.

A message was sent out to 235 villages asking if they would like to continue to have a presence on the Nabuur website. Out of those, 31 have replied saying they would like to stay. Added to the villages we marked “active” in our initial review – this would make a total of 91 villages that would be migrated to the new server.

We will be reviewing this list again to make sure all of these should be moved. The initial message did bounce back from several villages (about 30 total) – Pelle will be sending the list of those who responded including a list of the bounced messages so that we can review and determine if any of those villages need to be moved as well. We need to have a finalized list of who to move to Frans by Thursday this week as the server migration will take place this Friday, June 10th.

There are a total of 18,436 neighbours that have never logged in to the existing Nabuur site. This means either they joined before July 2008 and were active at one time, or they never activated their account when Nabuur last moved to the current site (which accounts for the majority of these). All are in agreement that these profiles need to be archived and NOT moved to the new server. People will be able to create an account on the new server if they decide to come back.

Nabuur must be migrated to the new server within the next 12 days. Frans, Pelle, Rolf and perhaps some others will be meeting on Friday to begin this migration. It is important to note this move is to a new SERVER, it is NOT migration to the new Nabuur website. There could be some unexpected bumps in the road with the server migration, but that will not be known until it happens. Once this migration happens, fewer villages will be visible – the rest will be archived. This should be the only noticeable change to active Nabuur users.

How long will this take?

According to Frans, they need to take the existing database, run the clean up script (roughly a 12-hour job) and then set up the new site. After this, the switch can take place in roughly an hour or so.

The log-in to Nabuur will be disabled before they migrate the database. The current Nabuur site will still be visible, but you will not be able to post new messages and volunteers will not be able to create a profile while this move occurs. Once the cleaned-up server is up and running, the domain www.nabuur.com will be pointed to the new server and things should run normally.

If anyone has any problems, please be sure to post or contact us and let us know. We're all hoping everything goes smoothly with the move.

--copy of original post by Jennifer Wells--

Dear all,

As we enter the holiday season and the year comes to a close, we’d like to wish you and your loved ones a joyous and peaceful holiday.

The past year has not been the easiest year in NABUURs history. At the beginning of 2010 we knew we had a difficult job ahead: changing NABUUR from a staff-run organisation to a fully volunteer run community. We’ve had to overcome a lot of difficulties, but at the end of the year we’re still together as a group of people who share the same purpose: putting their skills to use where they really matter.

Many thanks go to each one of you for all that you have contributed in this past year: by checking in regularly to see how things are going, by helping communities move forward, getting in touch with new volunteers, and in numerous other ways - Thank you so much!

It’s this sense of community that makes NABUUR work, and it shows:

• As a community, we’re now developing a new strategy for NABUUR, starting at the basis: by redefining NABUUR’s mission and vision, and taking a good look at what needs to be preserved or changed.
• For the occasion of International Volunteer Day, Local Representatives gathered some inspiring stories showing the impact of NABUUR volunteers.
• Last but not least, NABUUR facilitator Maria Zandt was awarded the “Online Volunteering Award 2010” by the United Nations Volunteers Programme, in recognition of her work with the community of Wakitaka, Uganda.

These kind of inspiring examples keep us focused and hopefully mark the beginning of a new and successful period for NABUUR.

Happy holidays, everyone!

On behalf of the NABUUR board and governance team,

Pelle Aardema

The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme today announced the winners of the "Online Volunteering Award 2010", an award which honors outstanding contributions by online volunteers to projects aimed at achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The announcement this morning brought some very happy news for the NABUUR community: Facilitator Maria Zandt was chosen as one of the ten winners of the award! Maria was nominated in recognition of her tireless work with the community of Wakitaka, Uganda.

Emmanuel Menya, local representative of Wakitaka, explains the impact that Maria has had on the community's project: “In less than two years, Wakitaka Youth Development Group (WYDG); a CBO found in Jinja-Uganda has been able to register many successes under the facilitation of Maria Zandt; an online volunteer on Nabuur.com. Maria, who became the facilitator of the CBO early 2009 when the group had only six goats and 250 broilers for the poultry project, has been able to transform and elevate the CBO activities which involve both income and non-income generating activities that are benefitting the community."

“No idea presented by the youth to Maria as the CBO facilitator has ever failed. All the ideas end up turning out into feasible projects," Emmanuel adds.

Maria's nomination was also in part for her continued involvement with NABUUR in various roles, including supporting other projects and taking an active role in discussions geared towards improving the NABUUR platform. In all her involvement, Maria brings a high level of commitment and dedication, along with great enthusiasm, and she is always employing her creativity and initiative to achieve results.

Congratulations, Maria, we are beyond proud of you and of your work with Emmanuel and the community of Wakitaka!

To read the rest of the winners' inspiring stories, visit the UNV website here.

On Wednesday October 13, the NABUUR director and supervisory board handed over their responsibilities to a new generation.

Present at the meeting were: Marius Enthoven, Peter Felix, Siegfried Woldhek, new Supervisory Board member: Rolf Kleef, new Director: Pelle Aardema, and by phone: Romina Oliverio, Denis Marsha Kabuuka. Unfortunately Jessie Bokhoven couldn't attend the meeting.

With the installation of the new supervisory board and director the handover of NABUUR to the community is completed.

This handover marks the last step in a long process that in fact started with the birth of NABUUR in 2002. The social internet with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as we know it today didn't exist yet, and Wikipedia was just a year old. The concept of online volunteering, the core of NABUUR, was unknown to many people.

In this environment NABUUR started as a revolutionary idea of people all across the world working together online to solve problems offline. The start of NABUUR also marked the start of an era of continuous learning. Simultaneously with the rapid development of the social internet, the staff needed to find out what works and what doesn't. What became clear was that NABUUR fulfilled a need with the services and connection it facilitates.

A few years ago, the NABUUR organization realised that in order to offer a real and scalable network, NABUUR itself should be a network, and delegate responsibilities to its community members, without a central office with controlling staff.

From that moment on, step by step, the platform was handed over to the community: approving new projects, bringing training materials together, managing the website and communication, participating in focus groups, and organising community meet-ups were taken on by volunteers.

On October 13, the ultimate step in this process was taken: the positions of Director and Supervisory Board were handed over to four volunteers from the "governance group", a community-initiated forum that discusses the strategy and next steps for NABUUR. All four volunteers have long-standing experience and relationship with NABUUR, and are eager to move ahead with the next phase.

We want to thank Siegfried Woldhek and the members of the outgoing Supervisory Board for their valuable contributions to NABUUR over the past 9 years.

NABUUR as it stands now is still a revolutionary concept.

We hope you will stay involved in its new development!

Outgoing Director and Board:
Siegfried Woldhek
Marius Enthoven
Peter Felix
Jessie Bokhoven

Incoming Director and Board:
Pelle Aardema
Rolf Kleef
Denis Marsha
Romina Oliverio

The NABUUR Camp has come to an end. It has been an extraordinary and productive event thanks to the 25 participants who came from different corners of the world (13 nationalities present) to jointly move NABUUR forward. Three participants missed the event due to difficulties with visa and flights.

Bringing together different users and developers into one space proved to be very effective. Much progress was made with improving pages and processes on the site under construction. Posts from other participants will show the progress made. Had there been more developers matters could have been taken even further.

And there was more going on than the valuable building of pages. Now that there no longer is a central staff, it was key for the maintenance and further development of NABUUR that several concrete tasks are picked up by volunteers. We’re pleased to report that hey have been. 7 teams have formed, to:
- Organize the selection of qualified board candidates before June 1
- Organize users platform for regular solicited & unsolicited advice to the board
- Organize maintenance of infrastructure: webservers, security upgrades, spam protection, etc, etc
- Website group: organize the further development of the site in close cooperation with the users, testing, migration, launch
- Quality: organize mechanisms that make sure that the villages or projects indeed exist, that the lively villages and projects are shown on top, as well as the most productive Neighbours, experts, documents, lessons learnt, etc
- Social media/news/project/launch: organize the connections of the site with the many other important sites out there
- Support / helpdesk/ welcome team: organize the care for the lost souls

Every group needs to make sure that the task gets done rather than trying to do it themselves with an undersized team, most groups will therefore welcome new members to share the burden of the work. New working environments will soon be set up, for now you can join us on http://nabuurcamp.org .

Most if not all participants felt that it would be useful to have more camps in the future. This would need a separate group willing to identify an agenda worth coming for, to find the organizers, to set up the process, etc.

Many thanks to all the participants!

Related posts:
"Oh the Sexy Goats pictures..." - A snapshot of Nabuur Camp weekend

Join the BarCamp to bring NABUUR to the next level! Febr 13-14 in Amsterdam

Three Ways You Can Help Build The Future of NABUUR

Nabuur Camp wasn't all work and no play. We laughed, we joked and we nearly cried in some situations and realistically we were here to get a good neighbours input into the Nabuur webs.

The first ever Nabuur camp kicked off with nothing more than an ambitious team with an even more ridiculously ambitious agenda and the day ended with outcomes that exceeded all our crazy expectations put together. The event drew participants from various diverse backgrounds, all with the aim of building a bigger and better Nabuur site to cater for the needs of the different Nabuur users. Next to that was an equally important discussion concerning governance issues in the future as Nabuur has grown bigger over the years and quality control and integrity among other things become a bigger concern.

The web design component of the programme began with participants being split into 4 groups concentrating on different aspects of the current pages on the website, namely the: homepage, volunteer page, local representative and facilitator pages and identifying areas of improvement. A team of developers was on standby to receive input and transform it into actual web content. By the middle of the day, the developers were flooded with wish lists from all parties- which had to be refined and specified more- before they started working. As the developers worked hard at making those wishes become a reality, focus shifted to the first governance discussion and refinement of multiple aspects of the new website including text development and defining search criteria. We enjoyed the idea of being able to raise expectations about the final outcome of the website because it is being developed by skilled participants, many a keen eye and above all passion as well as dedication that are hard to miss.

But on a “Fun Note” we noticed a running theme we all noticed was the number of very happy photos of villages displaying some very luscious, sexy goats. Now for some of us that means wealth generation, local empowerment and a source of sustainable income but for others the responses were:

"I love those spotty goats."
"They are Somethin Sensational"
"They are sooo...hot, their outfits...wow....!"
"Look, I've tried this before, trust me I am a professional."

"What, you want me to strip?"
"I think of a Film..." (Smiling)
"They don’t look like they want to be there..."
"Weird questions...I am flabbergasted, but I will give it a go..."

"I don’t want to be that excited about it, is that an okay answer?"
"Look, I think its a acrazy idea, but it might just work!"
"Awkward..possibly some shooting might be involved..."
"What on earth is this?"
"Stutter...stutter...my mind goes berzerk and steam comes out of it..."
"I am more into Brunettes."
"I cannot describe to you the image I have in my head right NOW!"
"Fluffy or cheesy...its a tough call."
"It doesn't rock my world."
"Hey, talk to the Hand."

It is interesting that these responses in some ways also represent a microcosm of opinions that different people from different cultures around the world feel about coming together to collaborate on an online volunteering project. Diversity is a wonderful thing. So much has been learnt just by sitting in the room with one another instead of always connecting only via email. Friendships had been forged online and
nursed for years via Nabuur.com without anyone having ever met one another. With that, also comes diversity of opinions and even disagreements. That is life in any collaborative project where people care and feel passionate about social issues. The good news is that such diversity of opinions is needed to successfully confront the challenges we are faced with in our world today.

Governance was split into 3 sub-topics. At the top of the agenda was the question of who would decide if and when the new website will be ready to go online. Naturally more issues were raised that indirectly affect this questions and a more concrete proposed plan of action is expected to be in place by the end of the day today. There is a possibility that a task team will be assigned to look into the issue taking into account the points that were raised and overseeing the implementation of the action plan through to the end. Other issues to be discussed today are about who Nabuur can potentially partner with in the future and of course how the entire Nabuur will be governed in the future. In fact, these discussions are in progress as we write this so expect better news on this later!

The discussion continues and it is a pleasure to watch the participants across the room from where we sit- clearly everyone feels strongly about one thing or the other but progress is being made. Most of us at the camp do not imagine the task accomplished over 2 days would be easily done. We do not imagine that the world would just be fixed. But maybe...for the chance to create neighbours and connections in a part of the world that we may not know very much about to start with....2 days out of our lives has been well spent.

There were impressive synergies but also incredible diversity gaps to overcome. The point is, we tried to generate something new and different. There aren’t any models we could copy from, so everyone kept an open mind and got on with it. Our styles were very different. Some of us wanted to build "fun" and "trust" and others were very task focused and still others more process oriented. It takes more
than a village, it takes a neighbourly gesture and generous attitudes to create a meaningful online volunteering experience and that notion came instinctively for us. From the village representative level, we were profoundly influenced by one representatives concepts of "trust"...he said, "For money would do a lot of things, but for unconditional relations that are built over time and a willingness to support one another, as human beings we would do everything in our power."

by Nonhlanhla Dube and Cecilia.W.Yu余詠詩

*A free digital guide for youth interested in becoming online volunteers and learning more about the rich world of online volunteering.*

TakingITGlobal (TIG), an organization that operates the world’s most popular online community for young leaders, and Nabuur, an online volunteering platform that links Neighbours (online volunteers) with Villages (local communities) in Africa, Asia and Latin America, announced today the release of a new Action Guide on Online Volunteering available for download on the TIG website.

Connect, Contribute, Collaborate, Change: Online Volunteering in Action is an impressive collection of tools, tips, and stories based on the organizations’ leadership in managing and working with large teams of international online volunteers. The guide is divided into four main chapters (Connect, Contribute, Collaborate, Change) and offers important resources to debunk myths about online volunteering while highlighting its many social benefits.

“Our hope is that this guide will help raise awareness on the potential of online volunteering as a tool for collaboration and change” says Chiara Camponeschi, TakingITGlobal’s Multilingual Program Manager. “Online volunteering can be a very powerful experience, especially given its potential to overcome many kinds of barriers.”

The Creative Commons-licensed guide is the culmination of the organizations’ three-month Awareness Campaign on Online Volunteering, a project which ended on December 5th, International Volunteer Day. The Campaign included the launch of a special issue of the multilingual online magazine Panorama by the tile “Meet the Volunteers”, and continued with a Live Chat that brought together international experts and global youth for a lively discussion on the role online volunteers can play as “agents of change”.

The publication of Connect, Contribute, Collaborate, Change: Online Volunteering in Action also coincides with the launch of TIG’s mini-portal for its Online Volunteering program and the world-wide release of its Pathway to Participation Model after which this Guide is inspired.

To download a free PDF copy of the guide, please visit: http://www.tigweb.org/resources/toolkits/view.html?ToolkitID=2655

TIG’s newly-launched Online Volunteering mini-portal can be found at: http://volunteers.tigweb.org

About TakingITGlobal

Established in 2000, TakingITGlobal serves youth worldwide through a multilingual online learning community and innovative education programs. TIG aims to help young people develop their potential as creative, technology-enabled and globally-aware citizens by strengthening their capacity as leaders and stakeholders, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and understanding, and increasing awareness and involvement in global issues.

About Nabuur

NABUUR leverages the Internet to enable people around the world to connect and collaborate. Online volunteers are matched to and linked with Local Communities in developing countries through www.nabuur.com. The people living in the Villages formulate projects to address local issues. Together, the community and volunteers find solutions. For volunteers, the focus is not on donating money, but on sharing knowledge, ideas and contacts. This novel approach leaves the initiative in the hands of the Villages. NABUUR combines the best of the old (neighborly help) with the best of now (the internet).

For More Information, please contact:

TakingITGlobal
Chiara Camponeschi
Multilingual Programs Manager
chiara@takingitglobal.org
http://multilingual.tigweb.org

Nabuur
Romina Oliverio
Volunteer & Online Communities Manager
romina@nabuur.com
www.nabuur.com

The first NABUUR BarCamp will take place during the weekend of February 13-14. It will convene ca. 30 website developers and volunteers from different continents to the beautiful city of Amsterdam. The goal is to bring NABUUR to the next level. A level where the users and developers are the key actors in the development and maintenance of the site. This NabuurCamp will put special emphasis on organizing the open development team and on making a new website ready to go live.

For who?

a. For developers: the new website is based on the Open Source CMS Drupal 6.x. Designers, themers, drupal confugurators and PHP module programmers are very welcome. You can find present work on it here: http://theme.nabuurtest.com

b. For users -online volunteers and local representatives- from different parts of the world- who can supply the developers with needs, feedback and wishes

Expect this to be highly participatory and interactive, and cover the things you wanted to know about using the internet to connect people in the South and the North for social change.

The NABUUR BarCamp is open to active participants, people with passion and interest in the topic. Since it's a barcamp, your expected to bring your expertise, knowledge and passion.

When and where?

13 - 14 February 2010, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Costs

The NABUUR BarCamp is a free event. Food and sleeping places will be provided. There even are limited funds to pay travel expenses for some of the participants.

Sign up

Come and sign up for the first ever NABUUR BarCamp. You'll get to work with a lot of smart people who, like you, have come to share and learn. And in doing so, you'll jointly bring NABUUR to the next level, where it can serve many more local communities and where the users and developers have a much larger say in the development of the site.

Go to the sign up form: http://tinyurl.com/nabuurcamp-1

* Please note that participants will be invited based on the sign-ups, but that signing up does not guarantee an invitation.

And while the event is being put together, you can already two things:

1. bring this opportunity to the knowledge of interested friends and colleagues
2. help developing the platform further on http://www.nabuur.com/en/group/nabuurcom-website-development/project/joi...

Siegfried Woldhek
Pelle Aardema
Romina Oliverio
Frans Kuipers
Kester Edmonds
Rolf Kleef