Blog Entries by Pelle Aardema

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)

Since 2005, Sushmita Lahiri, Local Representative of Kalna, has been teaching children at her own house. This week we received some very uplifting news.

Local Representative Sushmita Lahiri writes:

“School shifted from my house to its own building ! ! ! Yesterday, Tuesday the 5th of April 2011 !”

Sushmita writes she has been scrubbing off the old paint during her leisure time, and she was able to hire a painter to paint the first part of the building.

“The children are very happy in the new school! At this moment, only a part of the total building could be made fit for use. Please be assured that as soon as other parts complete and made ready for use, I will let you know!”

Congratulations Sushmita! We’re waiting for more positive news.

Read more about Kalna, and find out how you can help:
http://www.nabuur.com/village/kalna

Sushmita teaching at her house

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 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

In between clearing out the office, different conferences and meetings (more about that soon) and the all social media efforts you’d nearly forget about the redesign. But it’s still ongoing!

Last month saw the release of a new demo site that has been used for testing the first bits (take a peek at http://demo.nabuur.org)

You’ll notice a few things:

1. The new NABUUR logo!!! I’m proud to present our new logo, which is fresher, brighter than the current logo. Also notice that we’re moving from .com to .org, which fits NABUUR a lot better

2. With the new logo, the colour scheme will also change. Brighter colours and a more contemporary style.
3. The pages are still pretty empty. This is partly caused by the fact that the site is in development. Right now only the first basic functions have been installed. When more functions are added, the pages will fill up. But, as one of the main reasons for the redesign is to make NABUUR easier to use, they should stay pretty 'clean'.

Testing the new site
A number of Local Reps have provided their feedback on the first user cases that were implemented: ‘Sign up as a Neighbour and ‘Register your Villlage’. At the same time the NABUUR team has been live testing the demo with non-NABUUR users, in order to get feedback on the user experience. The collected feedback already lead to improvements in the design. This method of testing (both face-to-face and online) will be used for all the functionality that is developed.

If you have a look, keep in mind this is not a finished site yet, but feel free to test the sign up process. Any feedback is welcome here.

Upcoming functionality
In the meanwhile our team worked on the Village’s project room. A first version should be up in the coming week.

Want to be involved in the testing? Leave a comment or send me an email at pelle [at] nabuur.com

It all started with a message: "Hello Esther, my name is Mpoya Kiirya Eddy. Please join my Village Kisozi and advice me on my project for Orphans and Vulnerable Children."

At the end of the week, Esther will board the plane to Uganda: to visit Africa for the first time in her life AND to meet the Eddy who wrote her this short message. And she will not travel empty handed – bringing loads of good news and a very full program:

There’s a donation for beds, mattresses and bed sheets for 6 kids, the first part of a donation for a safe and clean water campaign sponsored by GGNET, reading books for 4-12 year olds, 425 glasses that were donated by EyeClarify / Hans Anders (who will be sponsoring glasses for a year). Next to that she’s bringing the news that AfricaSport will invest in the Kisozi football club.

Last but not least she’s bringing 140 euro that has been collected through their project on 1% Club (see the banner), which will give the goat & chicken project a good start.

In Uganda they will meet Sander van Zanten of ICU, a representative of Cycling out of Poverty and pay a visit to Paul Bulenzi in Jinja.

"We have to realize the school, and since we’re getting involved with bigger organizations I’m starting a foundation in the Netherlands as well. I try to learn as much from other projects and foundations as possible… yeah… things have gotten a bit out of hand", Esther says.

A short message goes a long way.

Have a great trip, Esther!

... and moves on to a more flexible way of working.

Today Siegfried and I moved out the last boxes, I only have to hand in the keys and that's the end of the NABUUR office in Amersfoort.

As NABUUR is changing the way it works - key now is to be open, connected and flexible - having a fixed office didn't feel like the right solution anymore.

Of course our team will still be meeting on a regular basis: our 'basis' will be the respective homes, Igluu in Utrecht - where we can use 'flex desks' (flexible workspaces) and we'll probably have to rent a meeting place once in a while. And you will still run into our team online: on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and of course the NABUUR platform.

Catch you there!

For those who regularly visit our Website development group it’s no surprise: the NABUUR site is being redesigned.

So far, most discussions and brainstorms have taken place within a small group of staff and volunteers, but the first screens of the new site will be visible soon.

Why this redesign?

Developing NABUUR is a continuous process. Not only new (technical) possibilities keep emerging; the actual contacts and work that take place in the villages on NABUUR also bring up new insights and lessons learned.

Last year, NABUUR was migrated from an old (XOOPS) environment, which didn’t allow further development of the platform, to Drupal, a new, state of the art environment which offers a lot of functionality. Quite a number of long awaited changes were made to the way NABUUR is organised. Due to limited time and means however, the old look and feel were mostly copied across without a proper redesign. The introduction of new features has caused pages to ‘clutter up’, making the NABUUR site not the easiest to navigate. Next to that the NABUUR site could use a fresher look and feel.

Approach

NABUUR is being redesigned through an ‘agile’ process:

- The functionality that the NABUUR site should offer is written down in 'user stories' that describe the experience that a certain user should have (the full set is ~50 user stories)
- Every month our team chooses the user stories that will be designed/developed that month.
- Starting with the basic functions, how futile they may seem: the signup forms were designed first
- Any user stories that are ready are implemented on http://demo.nabuur.org, where they can be seen and tested

Right now, it still looks like a fresh new Drupal site, straight from the box. But in the course of summer, bits and pieces will be added and a fresh new NABUUR will take shape. For now, click on the demo link above and take a peek at the new logo to see the new, fresher colours.

Join us in building!

We'll need a lot of help in various ways, and love to hear if you want to get involved! Are you an experienced DRUPAL developer? Or do you want to help with testing the site? Just leave a comment and we’ll get in touch.

Stay tuned for more Redesign news, and keep track of the conversation in the Website Development group.

Have you browsed around NABUUR this week yet? Noticed anything extraordinary? No? I thought so…

But an important change took place ‘under-the-hood’: the NABUUR site has been moved to bigger, faster servers!

The occasional visitor probably won’t notice the difference. The regular visitors and Neighbours should experience a better site speed, however.

Ever since the NABUUR Drupal site was launched last year, the speed of the site has been a point of attention. Frans and Kester pulled every trick they knew: PHP-errors, memcache, MySQL queries, 404-handling, Varnish and a dozen other ideas came to the table. And when all of that had been done (and helped quite a bit): let’s move the site to a bigger server.

Last Monday morning the operation took place: the access to the site was closed for 2 hours, it was made sure no postings were lost, the site was moved and then NABUUR.com was activated again, without any major interruptions. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of our tech team, I proudly present:

NABUUR at a higher speed!

For the curious techies: the site is running on 2 new servers now. The first one is a dedicated server for the database. The other dedicated server is the application/http server.

Type as fast as you can, our site can handle it ;-)

At this moment Erik Bos, the founder of Libre Foundation, is in Peru where he will train two groups of local leaders. A few NABUUR local representatives will be amongst the participants.

This is not the first result of the collaboration between NABUUR and the new Dutch NGO Libre Foundation: in the first week of May, 16 Local Representatives of communities in Kenya participated in a Leadership & Communication training. By doing exercises and role plays, the group learnt a lot about their own leadership styles, open communication, coaching your staff, motivation of volunteers, dealing with conflicts, proposal writing and outside-the-box-thinking.

“I believe that all of us came out of the training with something new and useful to our projects and communities”, said Lillian Muttimos, Local Representative of Budalang’i, “Please rest assured that this kind of leadership training is one that gets immediate results and it would be a good idea to provide opportunities to other Local Representatives where possible.”

New trainings are underway! In November/December this year, a training will be organised in Zambia. And there are plans for trainings in Uganda, Nepal and another group in Kenya. Let's drink to that :-)