By Millennium Campaign on

STAND UP Against Poverty was launched by the UN Millennium Campaign to mobilize people around the world to STAND UP Against Poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals. Six years ago, 189 world leaders sat down and agreed to eradicate extreme poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. On October 15&16, people across the world will STAND UP to remind them of this promise and set a Guiness World Record for the most people to STAND UP for a cause.  Events range from a large concert in Rome, to STAND UP moments during Spanish football matches such as the FC Barcelona game, to impoverished women in Tanzania coming together. You can find ways to get involved at the bottom of this post.

We chose Drupal for its excellent ability to facilitate user interaction and organize various levels of information and content. In the coming months the Campaign will extend this site and launch a completely redesigned Millennium Campaign site based on the same principles of self-organization and user interaction. Our goal is to create a user-driven site, rather then a top-heavy site with content simply filtering out to users from staff. Ultimately, our site users are the citizens on the street who will truly make a difference and move their countries closer to achieving the MDGs.

Drupal was also chosen because of it's open-source license and ability to easily create multi-site installations for the many partner organizations that are working across the globe to promote the Millennium Campaign.

The STAND UP site is a very robust installation of Drupal utilizing the locations api to record and display events from around the world. Organic Groups is used to help users coordinate efforts and better share content they post to their blog or in the forum. The site also uses the logintoboggan system so users can create an account and post their STAND UP Event without ever leaving the site.  The site could use a good custom layout of nodes and some other tweaks for accesibility, but with a short amount of time the goal was to get the functionality up as soon as possible.

Want to help? 

  1. You can sign in and join the "Technology" working group. 
  2. Post an event  if you plan to have one or find one near you.  There are virtual events happening in Second Life and on Yahoo!360 to name a few and it would be cool to get a Drupal STAND UP happening. 
  3. Would anyone like to make a Drupal STAND UP logo?  There will be significant coverage over the days of Oct. 15-16 (when events happen) leading to the 17, which is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and it would be great if the Drupal world took part.
  4. Don't forget to grab a button for your site. We use the same affiliates system from Spread Firefox so if you login you can keep track of your stats and move up the rollcall list. A generic "drupal" user was also created with affiliate link "510" if you want to have any of your clicks give Drupal credit and promote drupal.org.  That button code is below.


<a href="http://standagainstpoverty.org/aff/510/5">
<img border="0" alt="STAND UP Against Poverty" title="STAND UP Against Poverty" src="/files/images/Eventmaterial_button_1"/></a>

Notice that in "/aff/510/5" the affiliate id is "510." This is the generic drupal user. You can use that same link or play around with it if you want another image or flash banner that promotes Drupal while spreading the word on STAND UP.

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