Many Hands 2.0?

What’s with Many Hands 2.0?

We’re evolving – trying to get better at what we do, which is putting together teams of volunteers to make a difference somewhere in the world.

A big focus right now is revamping our website. We put up our existing website in 2005, a first-time website by a self-taught, unpaid volunteer. Although it did an OK job of publicizing and supporting our 2006 Africa work teams it was barely adequate at the time, and falls far short of what we need now.

What we need is a website – an online presence really – with all of this capability:

• Simple content management & update (even for non-tech weenies);
• Online registration & payment processing for work teams;
• Online donation processing, with individual team member accounts;
• Private, team-specific content – directories and forums;
• Blog/journal and photo space for individual team members;
• Single registration/login for permission-based access to all resources;
• Simple administrative dashboard;
• Oh yeah, did we mention it needs to be practically free?

A couple of us Many Hands admin types have been trying to get smart about how to accomplish all this, and now we can throw acronyms around as if we really know what we’re talking about (just enough to get us in trouble). We’re currently thinking that we should use an open source CMS (most likely Joomla or Drupal) with a compatible open source CRM (we’re thinking CiviCRM, which gets along with either), a PHP based forum (we disabled our current phpBB forum rather than having to deal with spambots – now looking at IVB and vBulletin), and some kind of blog module (just starting to look into possibilities).

If all that makes sense to you, you probably know more about it than we do – and we would gladly accept any guidance or advice you may have to offer. If you just want to watch us muddle through that’s ok too. We’ll be testing and looking for some criticism before going live with whatever we come up with, so stick around – if only for the amusement value…