NGO's, Open Source and Drupal

Kudos to Development Seed and Matthew Slater for making the first Drupal User Group meeting happen in Geneva!

The meeting took place in a little café near the train station, and the relative quietness of the location was definitely a plus; no need to scream to hear each other. Eric and Bonnie from Development Seed also brought their experience organizing this kind of meetings in Washington DC, and their proposed structure made networking with the right people a lot easier.

Once everyone got there, we started with a quick round of introductions, followed by a few five-minute "lightning talks" from volunteers about a current project. This time the topics were: Geo-mapping, a specific use-case inside an organization, using the color module for your theme (a tutorial is coming soon), and the interaction between open source and non-profit organization. This last topic turned out to be the major focus of the conversations that followed, especially with the project of forming a Geneva Web Development Collective.

This idea that we use technology as a way to achieve other goals is particularly appealing to me, and I just loved the collaboration atmosphere in which this meeting took place. Even if we do web development for a living, we can work together in a mutually beneficial competition.