CommunityCentral blog

I won’t attempt to write a full-blown history of CommunityCentral* up until this point – something probably best written with the benefit of hindsight. But I wanted to start this blog by sharing where the concept of an online space for the tangata whenua, community and voluntary sector came from.

In the beginning, the founding partner organisations talked about establishing a new ICT platform to ease some of the quandaries faced when sending out email newsletters.

As it stated in the main funding application from November 2006 some practical and strategic issues that arise from the way things are currently done, including:

• inefficient means of communicating across different disciplines
• poor infrastructure of the sector’s overall ICT network
• a lack of connectedness within the sector
• very short reach of existing ICT networks
• lost opportunity to share the immense knowledge, skill and experience within the sector
• waste of resources in developing and implementing separate solutions that perform the same task.

The project was seen as much about creating a new environment as “fixing things that are broke”. A new system would enable people reach of organisational networks beyond their immediate communities of interest.

Individuals would benefit too. Having a say on burning issues is part of this. As is providing a way for people to manage the way online information flows their way.

The vision recorded in November 2006 was “creat[ing] a digital community to advance an effective community and voluntary sector through the use of ICT.”

After many workshops and discussions over the past 18 months, the ideas from the original application still form the core of what CommunityCentral will offer.

In March 2008 the partners entered into a contract with a Christchurch based web development company egressive to planning and building the new website. Based on egressive’s recommendation an open source content management system called Drupal is being adapted to meet the unique needs of CommunityCentral.

Since then we’ve prepared detailed user stories which spell out how different people are likely to interact with the website. The developers have converted these stories into technical documentation (including a detailed set of use cases definition and non-functional requirements).

In the next two months we’ll be reviewing and tweaking an operational prototype of the new website. A reference group with a representative sample of flaxroots users will be in the frontline of testing.

We’ll keep you posted on how it goes. And from time to time, ask for your input. That’s the main reason for this blog, aside from contributing to the historical record.

* CommunityCentral is the new name for the CIMS Project.