By La Teresto on

A small group of people from different organizations (Environmental movements, Esperanto movement, The Earth Being Association and the Open-source movement), including people with some experience in web programming, brainstormed and created the Contact Center project.

This project aims to help people meet groups and find environments in which they can make their projects come true and promote their positive personal values. Broadly speaking, projects would be related to social justice, nature, health or community (including cultures and language).

The Contact Center's structure

The Contact Centre is a virtual meeting place where the users - groups (organizations, ecological farms, new projects or others) and the individuals involved or interested to volunteer - can get together. The basic concept is as follows: each user will have a personal profile, where all relevant information will be stored. Moreover, the profile has an area that explains the links that the member has (or had) with other users of the Contact Centre. The links between the users come with personal comments, which are used to specify the nature of the relationship between the users. Theses comments are references for other people who would be interested to contact the user. It is also suggested to include a Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) in the Contact Center.

This structure is based on already successful websites such as Couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.com) and Idealist (www.idealist.org). We would like to offer all services free, promote simple living and help small-scale and local projects. All modules would use open-source software (we plan on using Drupal 5.0) and a totally multilingual content (as available from Drupal's internationalization modules). Simplicity and ease of use are the basics of a successful website.

All subjects that are of interest to the users are to be detailed with description, links to external websites, related organizations, member-users, forums, events, images and links to other relevant subjects (subjects can be added by the users themselves). The content of the subject page is dynamically customized to optimize the information shown according to the user's known languages.

The Team

Our small group (starting with 7 people), created in Montreal, is currently exploring the tools available to start programming the website. We are also preparing documents to present the project to the World Social Forum and other alter-globalization effort group.

Anybody interested in the project with programming skills, especially PHP and / or Drupal is welcome to give us a hand. We would be delighted to work with an international group for this project. Comments and suggestions are also welcome, plus we may need help from non-programming crew in the near future for redaction, translation, etc.

Time to go

We would like the project to be online and ready in august 2007 (obviously this project is going to continue to evolve after august, constantly being updated and improved).

If you know of similar beginning or existing projects, let us know and we will try to join forces.

Please contact us for more details,
Y. Levasseur and B.-A. Legault, Montreal
yan.levasseur@lateresto.org

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x