Tag Archives: drupal

Changing Everything on ChangeEverything.ca

When we first launched ChangeEverything.ca, it was a hectic and amazing time. Not enough time to get everything done. One of the areas I felt we could do better was site usability and overall design. Kate and I always felt like we wanted to go back and make some improvements.

So this year, we blocked out some budget and started working on fixing some of those areas. Among the areas we focused on were:

  • improving the registration flow
  • improving the workflow for adding changes and blog posts
  • grouping social features together so people discover each other and interact easier
  • putting a sharper focus on the people, and not just on the text
  • making the site, well, just prettier

It was a complete pleasure working with Kirsten Hall, an extraordinary usability consultant here in Vancouver, the amazing Tim McAlpine and his team at Currency Marketing on the front end design, and Affinity Bridge a great Drupal development shop in town.

The process, like the original creation of the site, was charmed. Everyone worked together well, there were no real hiccups, and people had a lot of fun.

The upcoming design changes, including as mock-up of the new look and feel, were announced on ChangeEverything.ca today. We’re looking for Beta testers, so check it out and help out if you want.

Otherwise, I’ll let you know when everything launches in September!

ChangeEverything.ca is nominated for a Webby Award.

Webby Awards
I am so pleased and excited to announce that ChangeEverything.ca was nominated for a Webby Award.

This is such an incredible honour, and follows on the heels of being an Official Honoree last year. Please vote for ChangeEverything.ca for the Webby People’s Voice Award.

It is worth noting that the four other sites nominated in the category of Social Networking are:

  • Bebo
  • Facebook
  • Flock The Social Web Browser
  • Ning

Perhaps you’ve heard of some of them. It is mind-boggling to be nominated against some of the biggest developments in social networking of the last year or two. Amazing also to be the only company-created social network, up against a bevy of startups.

Equally impressive is the lineup of judges who selected the nominees and will select an ultimate winner.

The Academy is an intellectually diverse organization that includes members such as musicians Beck and David Bowie, Internet inventor Vint Cerf, political columnist Arianna Huffington, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, R/GA Founder and Chairman Robert Greenberg, Virgin Atlantic Chairman and Founder Richard Branson, Crispin Porter + Bogusky Partner and Chief Creative Officer Alex Bogusky, and The Weinstein Company Co-Founder Harvey Weinstein. Members also include writers and editors from publications such as The New York Times, Wired, Details, Fast Company, Elle, The Los Angeles Times, Vibe, and WallPaper. The 11th Annual Webby Awards received over 8,000 entries from over 60 countries and all 50 states and generated over 750 million media impressions worldwide.

It is pretty much exactly two years since we started developing the site from a concept, and so rewarding to see where Kate has nurtured and engaged the community of over 3,000 registered users. I am also heartened that we are the only socially responsible community in the running. Proves you can do well by doing good.

UPDATE: I added a link to where you can vote for ChangeEverything.ca for the People’s Voice Award.

A whole ‘nother level of online community.

I love Open Source software. The self-organizing of people to collaboratively create something they feel is worthwhile is an amazing model.

I’ve written a lot about ChangeEverything.ca here, but I have never written much about Drupal, the platform CE was developed on. This week we launched a small bit of new functionality to the ChangeEverything community called nudge. It’s a fairly simple application:

…you use it to tell the creator of a change or the writer of a blog post that you’re inspired by what they’re doing… and you want to hear more. Click it, and ChangeEverything.ca instantly sends that person an email – including, if you want, a personal message from you.

But the thing I love most about it is that when we wanted to add this feature to the site, there wasn’t a module available that did this. So after custom-developing “nudge” for the CE community, we released it free to the world as a module for any Drupal site.

Now that’s community!

UPDATE: Here’s a post on the subject from Social Signal.