Social Network for international volunteers

Hi,

i am an ex-volunteer who spent one year abroad in west Africa. I was working (and still do) for a little NGO, helping to support Solar energy projects and the technology itself grow a little in sub-saharan west africa.

I spent a lot of time down there coding my own crappy homepage and - every two month or so - writing way too long newsletters to all my supporters. I think no one really read these e-mails. I could have my time better invested in real issues.

When I came back, I thought I could make life a little easier for the following generations - so I set up a blog for our volunteers. Later i re-designed our Homepage (Drupal!). That was a very good experience for me - and gave me the opportunity to go a little further.

The project i want to Showcase here: http://volunity.net

Its a site inviting German Volunteers abroad, as well as ex-volunteers to use it for keeping contact, blogging, discussing local or work-related topics and organising groups. We try to ask the Users for feedback and discussion on what we can make better and what other tools we can provide. We dont have many users yet (~80), but aim at growing constantly over the next year.

features are at the moment:
Blogs
Wiki
Private messages
Photo upload
Groups (OG)
Buddylist

We use ~35 contributed modules, plus a few self-written mini-modules. The most important ones are:
CCK
Views
Panels
OG
Thickbox
Gmaps + location
Privatemsg
buddylist
userpoints
invite

The Theme is a Zen Theme, the tpl.php files were hardly changed. most is done by css (result is a pretty good html validation).

The language is German. (thats why my english here is not very correct). In case we get lots of users we can set up an english sister-site, but atm we do not have that on our roadmap.

heres the link.