Drupal for Advocacy and Social Change
Bubbling beneath the surface of the slick Drupal case studies are the small nonprofits, community groups and activists who have adopted Drupal for social change.
This panel will explore the ways Drupal has supported, shaped and influenced advocacy and social change online and offline. Drupal’s legacy as a platform used by the “people-powered” Howard Dean campaign in 2003 continues to radically transform the ability of individual activists to more effectively work for social justice.
Activists and community organizers will hear case studies demonstrating what can be done with Drupal, how it's done, and when to hand it off to other technologies.
Nonprofit web staff will learn about valuable Drupal resources to support their mission and reduce or supplant expensive, proprietary systems that so many nonprofits rely on.
Techies for good will get some ideas on contributing back—and how Drupal can be made even more effective for work involving social change.
Join us!
Panelists
Ivan Boothe is a Drupal developer focusing on nonprofits and social change work through Rootwork.org. A co-founder of the Genocide Intervention Network and community organizer with Casino-Free Philadelphia, he currently works with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He'll speak about using modules like Webform and CitizenSpeak to support advocacy campaigns, strategies for blogging direct action and rallies, and holding elected officials accountable through legislative scorecards. He has previously presented at the Nonprofit Technology Conference and the U.S. Social Forum, is a co-moderator of the Nonprofit Technology Network's Drupal Community of Practice, and is a board member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.
Ella Durham is an activist, designer and co-founder of Occupy Together located in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was recently introduced to Drupal through her work with #Occupy as a contributor to the Occupy Directory and has since started helping small, area groups influencing social change acquire the tools they need to maximize their efforts. She’ll speak to general website strategy and illustrate case studies of small groups doing big things with the help of Drupal.
Andrew Ward is a co-founder of Kalamuna, based in Oakland, California. He has several years of experience in Washington D.C. nonprofit political lobbying work, and has been a political activist for a decade. He’ll be talking about nonprofit-focused distributions like Open Outreach and the power of Panopoly for quick implementation by activists who know some basic Drupal. Andrew was introduced to Drupal through his nonprofit work, and since then has spun up quick, inexpensive Drupal solutions for nonprofit groups looking to affect positive change.
Benjamin Melançon was a co-author and lead coordinator of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, and is the co-founder of Agaric, a collective of skilled workers using Drupal and other open source free software to build web sites and tools that give power to their clients and communities.
Comments
+1 for this session. We help a lot of small to medium-sized nonprofits use Drupal, and many of them could be using Drupal to do more, and affordably. They're often unaware of what more they could be doing or what other similar orgs are doing with Drupal. Many assume replacing at least some proprietary 3rd party services that they use to support their advocacy work with their own Drupal infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive or unreasonable, and that's not always the case. I think developers and site builders that work with .orgs, as well as nonprofit staffers who are using Drupal, would really benefit from a session like this, where they can see some fairly straightforward ways that they could be using Drupal to help extend their mission work.
These are great storytellers with valuable stories. I've had the pleasure of collaborating with most of them on advocacy projects at some level, and can think of no finer cross section of the Drupal community to present salient nuggets of informed truth while challenging common assumptions about the relevance online advocacy in the struggle for social change.
+1 I would definitely attend this session.
+1 I'd be there too.
I'm really excited about this session topic. One of the things I love about Drupal is the fact that its community includes the groups listed above: activists, nonprofits, and techies for good. It'd be great to hear more about these case studies from the perspective of smaller groups, and I'm sure the lessons would be applicable to other types of organizations too.
Yeah, this looks to be a great session. Excited to hear perspectives and talk with others with similar projects, and will definitely be there.
Yes please!
I knew even before I clicked the link this would be a heavily commented session! Looking forward to seeing it in Portland.
Sounds like an awesome panel. I think it will shed some light on how much Drupal has to offer the advocacy and activist community. I've seen many groups turn to WordPress for their online representation because it can be quick and easy, even if in the long run they'd be better of with Drupal's power and extensibility. Also, I'm acquainted with one of the panelists and know him to be quite insightful regarding both political and philosophical matters, as well as Drupal.
Just want to thank everyone who's commented so far! I too am really excited about seeing this happen (and not just because I'm on it).
If anyone has any questions about the panel, feel free to ask. Or if there are things you'd like to see covered, let us know!
I worked with Andrew Ward on a couple projects when i also lived in Washington DC and think that his dual exposure to the DC Non-profit scene and the SF Bay Drupal community give him some unique and qualified opinions on this matter.
More importantly, isn't this kind of the point of this whole thing? Easy and free tools to empower people to affect change? Let's get this panel into THE SHOW.
+1 to this panel as a vital contribution to the Portland DrupalCon. I'd definitely be in attendance!
One thing i'll be reporting on briefly is the friction to collaboration we experience in both technology building and better world building communities -- including in projects designed to improve collaboration, such as Drupal's own stalled Snowball and DrupalFund initiatives -- and how we can overcome it, and establish processes and platforms for effective cooperation that are good for ourselves and a fit for the world. (The upside is huge as free software keeps our work belonging to everyone, which helps us get around some of the challenges faced by people building community resources in physical space.)
This session will be shaped in good part by its audience, and from the people who have already put in their interest in coming and participating, it's shaping up to be great!
* gift for the world