Development Seed Blog

We just received an email saying that our proposal "Portal 2.0: Using Social Software to Connect Geographically Dispersed Teams" has been accepted to be presented at the Web2forDev conference this September, scheduled during e-Agriculture week. So after DrupalCon, I’m off to Rome to present the Drupal powered intranet package we’ve been developing :) !

Before I get into what the presentation is about, I’d like to share why I think this conference is so important for the development field. Web2forDev brings people in the agricultural, rural development, and natural resource management fields together to talk about their work and how technology can support it, and it brings in a lot of people directly involved in this work including those from developing countries and people working on the ground in those countries. The whole idea of the conference is to get these development people in the same room with technology people to find ways to improve their access to new tools that will make their important work more effective. Basically Web2forDev addresses how web 2.0 tools can help development organizations manage knowledge and help their people network.

Our presentation will talk about how interactive software can be integrated into program operations to improve communications between teams on the ground and their offsite associates. This will become even more important (and possible) as connectivity improves in developing countries and spreads out to rural communities. We want to cut though the buzzwords of internal blogs, wikis, and RSS readers and look at how these tools can really be used and how simple solutions can lead to huge performance improvements within teams. Much of what we present will be pulled from our work on team portals for the World Bank and most recently with World Resources Institute. For example, we’ll show how internal blogs can help teams better communicate and improve their accountability, as compared to long email threads. We’ll also explain how a wiki can improve information management thanks to versioning and good user control. We’ll also touch on how RSS and news aggregators can save managers time each day by bringing the news they need to them. In our presentation we hope to share how a collaborative space like this quickly becomes a rich information repository that then organically evolves over the life of a project.

To help turn these concepts into on the ground possibilities I will be showing off our new intranet package that we hope to release in early September. I’ll also be showing off the open source Managing News solution, built for the World Bank and World Resources Institute. Both of these solutions are built open source content management system Drupal.

I can't wait to see who else will be attending the conference. I’m hoping I’ll be able to talk about how this same publishing environment can create “village portals” for local communities that have recently gained internet access by providing the space to generate local content. Even in established markets like the United States, local searches are becoming increasingly popular. I’ll also be asking around to see whether this same system can be used by farming cooperatives to develop best practice documents, or if it can be used by agricultural producers to share news on marketplace conditions and other factors important to their work.

When in Rome… I’m hoping open source intranet tools get hotter in the development community.