 All right, I'm gonna go ahead and get started. It looks like everybody's finished lingering in on their walks. I'd like to welcome everybody this afternoon to Designing for Disasters, an inner progression to a more prepared world. This is the case study with Forum One and American Red Cross. Before we get started, I'd like to make some introductions though. And it's not moving. Let's try now. Now, there we go. You have to click next, just let you know. First, I'd like to introduce Ian O'Donnell. Oh, hi, my name's Ian. I manage knowledge and research projects with a global disaster preparedness center at the American Red Cross hosts. I'm Chas Chelmy. I'm a technical architect at Forum One and worked on the American Red Cross community website on some different phases that we've implemented lately. Next, we have Michaela. Hi, my name is Michaela Hackner. I'm a project director at Forum One and I led the overall strategy for the preparecenter.org website on the Forum One site. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about the post launch experience today and user experience. So with any good case study, we need to first identify what the challenges were and Ian is gonna go ahead and present on that. Thank you, Chas. Yeah, I guess I should mention I'm also the project owner within the Red Cross for the website that we're talking about, which is preparecenter.org. Okay, so I wanted to give a little bit of background on the Red Cross. And I think most people have probably heard of the organization but I think in some ways the history of it ties into what we've been trying to do with this website and with the center that I work for. The Red Cross itself was started 155 years ago and was essentially a concept at first. I mean it was an idea around starting, creating a humanitarian organization that started in Switzerland based on experience in Italy on a battlefield. And the idea quickly spread to different countries and countries started their own Red Cross clubs and those became Red Cross or Red Crescent National Societies. Within the different countries, locally people started up Red Cross chapters or branches. So now that we have this network of 189 countries with a Red Cross or Red Crescent, we probably have somewhere between 10 and 20,000 branches worldwide that are doing activities in local communities all over the world. And one of the challenges we have really is now trying to tap back into that grassroots interest. We have lots of structure that we've built out internationally through an international federation based in Geneva through our structure of national societies in each country. But the center I work for is really dedicated to building out more sharing and learning across this network of different Red Cross partners around the world and the set of partners they work with. So the local governments, other kinds of civil society organizations and NGOs, different kinds of academic organizations. But really looking at how can we pool experience on disaster preparedness so that we're sharing more and benefiting each other from this expertise that we're building within the pool. And in lots of ways, honestly, our websites and web communities in the past haven't served us very well. Like we've typically had very kind of communications and marketing focused public websites and then intranets that were more the technical side helping practitioners. And what we've been trying to do with this prepare center site and also the center itself is to kind of flip this around a little bit and make the collaboration more publicly available and accessible and try and draw wider networks of partners into the process. So the center itself, we see ourselves as a resource center that's kind of again, tapping this wide network of Red Cross partners around the world at international levels, national levels and local levels. And then also functioning too as a think tank to try and build the evidence base for disaster preparedness to look at what measures are most effective, how can we better promote those, how can we isolate the ones that are effective from the ones that we just kind of believe in for common sense reasons. But ultimately with an idea to help more communities be prepared and to kind of have better resilience against the forces from natural hazards. Just want to mention a little bit, we'll talk much more about details of the site and our audiences for it. But in many ways our primary entry point is to try and reach out first through this network of Red Cross partners but then also to see that they have whole networks of partners themselves and trying to see ourselves as part of this wider humanitarian community that's looking at these issues. There's really a wide number of organizations now that are dedicated to issues around resilience, around disaster preparedness. And what we want to do is create a resource for practitioners that are really working at local levels and in the field on these issues. Just to give you a little bit of an idea on the schematic, I mean again we're trying to balance on the left hand side the set of Red Cross partners, it's 189 country partners. On the right hand side, this whole set of other partners that are coming from other contexts, whether they're international or national governments, universities, civil society organizations, NGOs. And then we're trying to bring all this together in the middle, so the center I work for is hosted by the American Red Cross but it's a joint project with the IFRC which is this international federation based in Geneva. The center is also one of 13 centers that exist on different topics. So we have other similar centers that work on climate change, on first aid, on psychosocial or mental health issues, on livelihoods, volunteering. So a whole range of different topics. And in some ways the centers too are meant to be a kind of very proactive effort towards this kind of partnering that we have individual parts of the Red Cross trying to step forward and host a center of expertise and draw in the wider network. And we're working with a set of partners then to see how we can contribute on our end on the preparedness side and connect this to other aspects of how these other centers are working on resilience. Which brings us to the site itself. And one of the first things we did, the center itself, I mean, our center started two years ago. And one of the first things we wanted to do was build out a website that would hopefully be a good center of collaboration for us. As I've mentioned over the past five or 10 years, we've had this interesting mix of public facing websites that were very marketing oriented for the Red Cross and internet sites that were there to share technical information but that weren't very open or widely accessible. So people had to have passwords to access them. Lots of people that were working for the Red Cross, either staff or volunteers weren't aware of them, didn't have access. And probably worst of all, none of the materials on those sites would show up in the common search results because they were all hidden behind firewalls and not accessible. So with this preparecenter.org site, we've been trying to build out this essentially a clearinghouse for resources on one hand but also a place for hopefully collaboration among these different partners to contribute their own learning, their own information, guidance and materials. And then to keep on kind of building out features that would help us innovate and build out more creativity in terms of how that information is managed jointly in the future. So we were very interested in open source solutions. You're thinking, looking at a variety of different products originally that we thought might help us to get to the kind of place we were hoping to be. But I think kind of committed to some of the same ideas that you guys have in the open source community around software development. We were looking to develop open source solutions around disaster preparedness. So thinking about how do we create this kind of, you know, what's the disaster preparedness software, you know that we're trying to open source and help share among a wider set of users and practitioners worldwide. This ultimately led us to Drupal as a solution. And we've been working then with Forum One as a development partner and with Aquia for hosting to build out this preparecenter.site, center.org site. But now Chas and McKay are gonna talk us more through, but hopefully you'll see the interesting aspects of it and we would welcome kind of your comments and feedback. Thank you. Thank you, Ian. So as a technical architect for Forum One, when we sat down with American Red Cross, we had to identify the initial solution based off the set of requirements that they came to us with. And that led us to a scrum process. So we've collaborated with the Red Cross using an agile approach. We consider ourselves really an extension of the Red Cross and really acted as a design and development team while the Red Cross was the product owner. Managing such a large set of requirements, we were able to easily place them into a backlog and really flush out the level of efforts, prioritize and then move those items into sprints. The iterative approach allowed for really a transparent process that not only made the launch a success, but also allowed us to revisit feedback and enhancements that we needed to make through the life site of the website itself. So during the discovery process with the Red Cross, it led us to engage the community in a real topical manner using kind of a Wikipedia approach to content. We were able to develop a topic section that called users to interact not only with the topical comment, content in a familiar manner, but also make it very easily searchable and filterable using Solr and along with Acquia Solr and the Solr modules that come along with Drupal. This is an example of the topic detail screen. And you can see here that we were able to not only focus in on particular sections of content, but also provide calls to action for the community to be able to not only ask questions, but also to be able to submit their own resources and their own topics. Next was the resource library. Since dealing with such a large global community, there was lots of resources that the different community members had that they wanted to be able to share and give back to the community. So one of the site features was the use of multi-level resource information with opportunities to be able to educate the community more on particular areas for disaster preparedness that they may not have been aware of. This here is actually an example of a conference of library resources with some enriched faceted search tools that also help the users define the information they were looking for by calling out resource types, topics, and then since also we're dealing with such a global community, the ability to enable kind of a multilingual approach to a community website. Here we can actually see the listing page of the resources and this gave us the ability to easily display the information, but also again, give us the ability to call out the information and give the user the ability to look for their information and their own native languages which led us to ability to really kind of hone in on how we handle multilingual with the community using entity translation. So this was kind of a complex challenge that we faced. There's a couple different options out there when you're looking at Dribble, when you're talking about multilingual, you can look at kind of more of the easy approach with Google Translate, but we all know here if you've ever looked at Google Translate, it doesn't do the job completely. So in this case, we actually went and looked at the entity translation module and relied on the community itself to be able to input the content in their native language which then we were able to actually harness with solar to be able to filter down based on the language that they were wanting to look at the content in, but also the ability to get back to the community and the content that they were more familiar with. And then responsive design out of the box is something that we always think about when it comes to any type of web project that we do at form one. This project was no different. There's an integral part to every step of our design and development and then nearly every site we build is responsive. So we could kind of pioneer some of the development of our own responsive themes that's built on some common technologies that's not only responsive but accessible. And in fact, we recently just actually put that theme, base theme back actually up to the community and I'll be more than happy to talk to anybody that's curious about looking at that offline. But this theme allowed us to be able to kind of build on some common technologies that were easily understood and adopted by anyone who wanted to manage the site. Not only did it allow us to focus on responsive design, but we were also to be able to take advantage of some low bandwidth considerations as well. If you've worked globally outside of the US, you know that a lot of countries don't have the infrastructure in place to be able to handle a rich media looking website and their medium of choice outside of the US is generally mobile devices. So we had to think about when it came to responsive design how we were gonna handle getting the same content across but in a less rich way but in a way that was still fast and responsive to those end users. So with the mobile device, we were actually able to integrate that into the responsive design so that the site was and the community itself was able to be adopted on any device that they wanted to take a look at. So those were the kind of the challenges that we took a look at and the technical approaches that we had to take when building the site. The next thing I actually wanna do though is turn over to Michaela because while we built an awesome site, we had one big reality check that we had to take a look at. Great, thanks Chaz. So we launched the site at the end of last year actually on October 31st, so Halloween. We're all really excited. As Ian had mentioned earlier, the Red Cross already has an pre-existing network of folks offline so the whole purpose of this project was to bring everybody online. And in the wake of Typhoon I.N., we thought it would be a really apropos time to get people excited about the community and sharing with each other. So we had this really great launch party which we do with all of our websites and this is the Red Cross and Form One teams celebrating over cake and beer which is what you must do when you launch a website. And everyone was really excited. The Red Cross got a lot of great initial feedback from folks within the Red Cross and different partners about how great the site looked, the potential for everything that was on the site and everyone seemed really pumped about getting in there and using it. But what actually happened was a lot of beautiful, empty rooms. As I said, people sounded really interested when we told them about the site. They expressed thanks over and over to Ian and the GDPC team about the potential for the site but we weren't seeing the kind of activity online that we expected and as any of you guys know if you've worked on a community before it takes a while to get a community up and running but again we thought because there was this pre-existing network of folks that it wouldn't be as difficult as it might be in other cases. Because the majority of the content on the site was intended to be crowdsourced in that Wikipedia manner we relied on site members to grow the content and promote the site. And so when people first logged into the site there wasn't a ton of content there. The Red Cross team seeded a bunch of content that they had within their own stores but because it was difficult to kind of get the word out early on there wasn't a lot of other contributors in the community sharing information. One of the big areas of the site that we had hoped would get a lot of traction was the topic pages which would allow different community members to take ownership of specific pieces of content and really share their areas of expertise with others. And that turned out to be a really big ask for folks because the topic pages were pretty long and had a complicated form behind them and people kind of gave up before they finished the form and submitted their content. The easiest way for people to contribute content was through the resources. A lot of folks already have the resources within their communities that they're sharing with their partners around disaster preparedness best practices. And so we thought, hey, this is a great way for people to upload those resources. And initially again there wasn't this kind of response that we had expected. Although the resources were the highest amount of contributed content. There were about four to five users who contributed the most of it. And most of them were Red Cross employees who were really trying to help generate buzz around the community. The other area where we thought people might get involved quickly is in the comments section because a lot of these partners interact regularly with Ian and his team through email and in person. So we thought it just seemed natural that they would jump online and do that in the comments areas. But there were really only four to five comments from non Red Cross folks and 15 total comments period. So we were really hoping for an initial push of a bit more content and a lot more activity from folks. And this was primarily, the lack of content was primarily due to the fact that there were only 350 users registered right after the launch and 48 never returned and many were not active really after the launch of the site. So people went there because they heard it was great and then they kind of were unsure about what to do. And so that led us to go back to our process that Chas mentioned at the beginning. Our agile process has us, we make a hypothesis about what's gonna work and what's gonna solve the problem. We go through sprints and we iterate and develop all these features that Chas talked about. And then we go back and test our assumptions through user testing, user feedback and analytics to really understand what happened. So we visited our process and in early, early this year we sat down with the Red Cross and started thinking about okay, what's going on here? What can we do to make this community more vibrant and exciting and get people in there? And we took a look at the analytics and some user feedback that the Red Cross collected and we determined that, well we had one kick ass tree but our users wanted a forest and we wanted a community. So all of these different features were really robust and awesome in themselves but they didn't really piece together something that felt like a community and people didn't understand that the site was intended to be this content sharing resource rather than a Red Cross mouthpiece. So we thought about where our members were coming from. What were their challenges? What was going on on their day to day basis? What were things or hurdles that were keeping them from getting into the site to begin with? And what could we do to overcome those and get people excited? We focused a lot during our development sprints on the intricacies of topics and multi-lingual functionality. Chas kind of gave a nice overview of all those details and those pages are amazing, they're really powerful and they can handle lots of different types of content and provide a lot of connections between content and of course the ability for people to upload and share information. But what ended up happening was we lost the forest for the trees and missed an opportunity to really connect with users and ensure this adoption. So we began to recreate a new backlog for the next iteration of the site and what we focused on was simplifying basic site features. So we looked at account creation, content loading and sharing, including more descriptions on list pages to provide context for the site so that people would understand what those pages were about and to let them know that this content was for them to share as well and then really understanding how people wanted to share the content and meet them where they were. So what you're looking at here is a very simplified account creation form and I can't show you the original one because it goes on several pages, well not several pages, but it's pretty lengthy. We wanted to get a lot of information from users so that would help them connect with each other but ultimately getting people in the community and creating accounts was the most important thing so we shortened the form and made it a lot easier for folks to connect. We also simplified the upload form for sharing resources and sharing topics. This is the resource page, creating a resource page and again like the site is extremely powerful and allows people to slice and dice content in lots of different ways but when you're trying to just upload a report or something that you've created a how to guide, it's a bit intimidating to have to make all those decisions right then and there. Rather that's something that maybe a content curator can do after the fact and really help get the content with the taxonomies that we wanted to have. The other thing that we did was we created a new content type called Stories. Early at this year, I went to one of the GDPC events and they have these regularly all over the world where they get people together to talk about best practices in disaster preparedness so exactly what the site's supposed to do online. They have a lot of events that are offline and I was pretty much blown away by hearing everybody's story about all the cool things they're doing all over the world to make the world safer for you and I so that when a disaster happens, we know what to do and we have the infrastructure to protect us and as people were going through all these stories, I was thinking, well, this makes a lot of sense for people to share stories in the same way that they're doing here online because that's how everyone's connecting and that's what's starting the conversation. So I sat down with the Red Cross team and they agreed and it seemed like the next great step to getting folks sharing stories and sharing content because that's where they already were. So we built out a Stories content type and what you're looking at here is the Stories listing page and you can scroll down and see other stories that folks in the community have contributed. So it's another way to explore the content and a little bit easier to market so you can get people to come into the site to see a story and then they can explore topics or resources and other ways of all the great resources that are within the site. When you drill down into one of the stories, this is one of my personal favorite stories, the Pillowcase Project. I encourage you to go to the site, which is all open, by the way, as Ian mentioned, it's for everyone. So if you're interested in disaster preparedness, you're welcome and all the content is above a password so you can check it out. But anyway, this is a listing or a detail page for a story and when you scroll down below the narrative, you can actually see a list of takeaways of lessons learned so that it kind of breaks down really what happened and if the user wants to share a document around how to recreate this, they're able to attach a document to this page as well. So it provides another way to view this information and to get people interested. We also talked a lot with the Red Cross about an engagement strategy. So looking at getting content in there before, they get full adoption from the community so starting to see more content reaching out to members, getting people excited and encouraging them to share their information and increasing calls to action across the site generally so that people really understood it was a community. Again, I think we tried and in our heads, it seemed like it was definitely calling out as a community but I think the cues weren't as direct as they needed to be. So again, trying to really focus on getting people to realize that the content there was from them and to get people in there to share what they already had. We also talked a lot about community management so that we could really get someone in there to encourage users to participate and get them excited and happy to announce that the Red Cross has hired someone. Renata is sitting in the front row. She's the new community manager. So she has an awesome task ahead of her to really engage this community and really springboard the activities so we're super excited to have her on board. And then finally, the Red Cross is working on coming up with more marketing techniques to get people into the site. We came up with these stickers at the end of last year that we thought would be a great way for the Red Cross to promote the community by handing out stickers when they're out in the field or at events just to let people know that the community exists and I know that they're working on several other ways of reaching out to their community and creating some buzz around the site. So what happened after we did a lot of these things? Well, the initial results were the news story section on the site are the most highest traffic content pages and have very low bounce rate, meaning that people stay and read once there on the page. I'm sure most of you guys know what bounce rate means. Since adding in the intro paragraphs onto landing pages to provide more context about the content, we've been able to get our bounce rates there better under control. I think before people used to see this really long list of content and weren't really sure what it was about and then they would leave the site. So now we have an explanation for what it is and what the bigger picture is and a nice photo to help illustrate that. And so the bounce rate for the resources page dropped by 65%, the bounce rate for the countries page dropped by 68%. And we hope to continue to see these numbers drop and more content coming on the site as people have different opportunities to share information. But this continues to be an evolution like every web project should be. That's the approach that we take where your community is always changing, your audience is always changing, so it's really important to understand the analytics behind what's going on and really get feedback from users because that's the best way to pivot and really make the site something that they're gonna be excited about. And we're really excited to see the community grow and for people to use all of the more sophisticated features on the site and we think it's just a matter of time once folks get in there and get more comfortable with what the community is about before they get really into those areas and we see some tremendous potential there in the future. That's the end of our presentation today and we're here to answer any questions you guys have about the community or building the site and just a note if anyone is interested in working at Forum One, we are currently hiring project managers and developers so see me afterwards if you're interested. So I'm sure there's plenty of questions. I know one question I'm gonna actually ask myself because I know I heard this one in this presentation at Nice Camp and it was once you guys launched this, what happened, you didn't get fired because the site wasn't successful. No, we're very transparent and we partner with our clients and form a partnership with them in the beginning so there's mutual sharedness with the responsibility when a website comes out and that's why agile was so important in that approach to making sure that we could iterate that's the title of the case itself being able to kind of iterate through this process to make sure this was successful. So first question? Yeah, it's actually a two par question. So I'm actually a big merchant preparedness guy. I do a lot of work on the subject. I lead trainings and so two parts. So one, it seems like this website is targeted at peacetime training so there's more, people have some idea what to do when things go boom and secondly, what languages is the site available in? Thank you. Sure. Yeah, I mean we're definitely trying to focus on pre-disaster preparedness. I mean we want it to be relevant also for post-disaster as lots of things you can do around reducing your risk in the future once disasters happen but I mean the real challenge and need is around helping people before disasters actually happen. So I mean it's a lot of where our focus is. The language piece, yeah right now we have resources up in I think 16 languages. That was one of the challenges we had actually. It was like we wanted to be active in more languages. Like we knew we couldn't translate the whole site into the set of languages we wanted to be supporting. And even now I think we would like to get to some more closer to like 50 or 60 languages. I mean it's just great stuff being developed all over the world. It's shared very widely because it's kind of kept in its own national pool. So we're trying to give more exposure to that and just make people more aware of what's out there. So it's been a lot of how we thought about this kind of multi-lingual approach and I think we're, yeah we've been happy with the results on that in many ways. Yeah man if you go to preparedness.org at the very top as the language selector for the interlink translation if you click on it it'll show you the current content language that we provide there. And if you have resources you want to add into the languages or all for that. Yeah definitely. Hi my name's Dustin Boger. Last year I actually was a participant in part of the Help for OK process that we went through and I wanted to know you've done a lot of preparedness for pre and post but what about looking towards projects that help during an event and also maybe put you on the spot we're having a boff after this on disaster recoveries maybe somebody might want to show up. Yeah man I think for the Red Cross this is certainly maybe we're focusing on kind of before, during and after. I think the group I work in a lot of this is we want to give more attention to pre-disaster preparedness and lots of the things that you do pre are also relevant during and after but I think we're certainly interested in ways we can engage on helping those to showcase more of what's happening during events. I mean some of the delays we had too with the project actually because we had lots of other things going on. Michaela mentioned the Typhoon High On response. Like I myself was out for six weeks in the Philippines working on recovery assessment. Yes I think those of us it's a relatively small team we're working on like a bigger context than the Red Cross but we're trying to pull together kind of the practical experience of people who are doing this work every day and make it useful too in the different countries context. Like I think lots of the resources that I've put together in the past too have kind of been driven by what's happening in North America or in Europe. I mean so really trying to reach out to and let this wider set of countries share their experience and their learning as well. So I mean really fascinating to see what we can draw back in from the Philippines and from other places too that are having disaster events. And as far as the boff if you need someone from a technical standpoint I'll be more happy to stop by. Since you designed the site around a lot of user generated content how do you moderate that content? Do you have like strategy in place or people dedicated to that task? Yeah in any ways we wish we had the problem where we were overwhelmed by content suggestions. Sort of how different levels of contribution. So I mean so anyone can access anything on the site right now. To make comments or to add resources you just have to create an account and log in. To actually make changes to some of the topical content we have like another level of permissions we have. So we've extended that to maybe 15 or 20 people. And we could expand that in the future. I guess we ideally think that might grow to be a couple hundred people. But I guess we're seeing the kind of different levels of engagement, different opportunities. And trying to balance that way. But we'd really love to draw people in in terms of making comments, suggesting resources, kind of participating in the dialogue. If people want to engage more, I think we're open to that and we kind of have the mechanisms to kind of promote people up in the permissions a little bit. But some of this too we're just trying to figure out what's the right balance and we can kind of dial in at different levels. Depending on the number of contributions coming in and what the kind of demand and interest is. And then as far as like the more visual content like the stories that we've implemented recently. When users are actually submitting that content it's actually going into an unpublished format. And then the community manager as well as Ian can go in and help kind of curate that information because in order to tell a story, words are great but pictures that actually can help tell that story well are important. And we don't really necessarily require the user when they're creating a story to upload a picture. So that's part of the curation process. And so if we do it in an unpublished format we have the ability to kind of either get more information from the user to see if they actually have a photo that they want to actually upload as well. Or actually go and curate a photo for ourselves that goes along with the story before it actually gets published. So when they do the story do you have like some kind of notification letting them know that it's might be edited at some point and it's original format? Yeah, we utilize the workbench module on the website. So from a standpoint of an administrator there's notifications that can take place to let them know that the content's been added. And there's just the general message when a user is actually saving the form that says the content's been saved and whatever information we want to be able to provide back to the user on that. As Chas said, usually we're in kind of direct contact through email and other channels also. So I mean we're trying to coax things like the photos also things like if people have guidance materials that go along with the story we'd love to capture those and be able to share those. People read the story and the next questions are like how can they do this in their own location? So we want to be able to link to those kind of resources as well. Yeah, and I think in general we really try to keep the barriers low for people to contribute content because we knew that any community it takes a while to get things going. So we tried to create, to remove most of the barriers into moderation so that people could immediately see the gratification of uploading a resource for example or posting a comment. Nice project. And it reminds me of a project we've done a few years ago for Shelter Center. It's also a resource center. And that brings me to question two, one is did you have lots of collaboration with other organizations worldwide? And second, are there any plans to open up the data in a computer readable format? Let's say Dublin Core or any other schemas? Right. Yeah, but actually we'd quite close contact to with the Shelter Center like with Tom Corcellus and his team. So I mean we'd known them from a few years back as well. And certainly as we were developing the site we were keeping in mind kind of a desire to be able to share data and information back and forth particularly around this kind of resource and tools area. So it's something we've discussed with them. I mean we've had discussions too with UN partners. I mean looking at some of the World Bank partners as well. It's not something, I mean I think we have it in our minds in terms of future development and I guess as we're thinking about how we're structuring these kind of resources and what the data is behind it. You know we're keeping it in mind. And we haven't really built out that kind of like API or data feed mechanisms at the moment but it's something that's on our short to medium list. It's in the backlog. We're trying to test out how to do it. Yeah, it is in the backlog. You know what's the most practical way? What's the demand that's out there really? But from our perspective too we'd love to be able to kind of steer people off to other sites, just reference it on our site. And if it exists somewhere else you can draw in resources make them more accessible than the parent. It's actually been an interesting trust issue within the Red Cross. Like people first are often reluctant to have us share the information. And they're a little bit worried about sharing it widely publicly. You know what I think we try and calm those fears. But the second word people have is that we're somehow trying to steal the attention away. Like so for example we have colleagues that work a lot on disaster response law based in Geneva and they have some resources on their site for the IFRC. You know it's been a case of trying to convince them that this is really about promoting what they're doing and that we can easily link off to that and we can keep the main source of the documents still on their site but just give a kind of greater opportunity for people to see and discover it on our site. So this is something too that we're still trying to build a kind of greater culture of sharing within the Red Cross and with other external partners as well. So at this moment there's more still a political issue than a technical issue? Yeah definitely. I think the technical side, I think the political part that's just a matter of time. I think the question is still like what's the real demand for sharing resources back and forth. I mean we've had lots of discussions ourselves internally around. We can see that it's really easy in terms of technical feasibility. The question of like how much other organizations are really looking to trade that kind of resource back and forth is kind of open to question. So we're still trying to explore that and understand it better. Yeah and from a technical side it's not really much of a technical issue. We've done plenty of data visualization on plenty of other websites, globalchange.gov, which we just launched recently is actually a good example of some data visualization and being able to get information back as far as reporting's going. So technical side we kind of know what the solution should be but like Ian said it's more of kind of interacting with those partners of where we're going to get that additional information, how we're going to get the additional information, how we're going to digest that back into Drupal so that we can then turn around and visualize that back out to the community. Yeah I sat down and realized I had some other questions. I'd like to hear more about what you're planning for like is, so you said I heard references to being mobile compatible. So mobile compatible for reading or mobile compatible for actually uploading content like pictures on the fly. And second is I'm not entirely sure what website you're talking about because the URL isn't in the description. Okay. So thank you. Yeah the URL is preparecenter.org. So sorry about that. It's in a few of the slides but I guess yeah we should have put it in. Yeah certainly right now we have a responsive design. So I mean the people can read the content, they can log in, they can add content all through a mobile device. I don't think we've set it up yet that people like the question of taking a picture and having that directly drop in. I think you'd still have to go through the gallery settings on your phone and then save it back from there. But it's... Yeah that would be more of kind of a mobile app approach which we really haven't really discussed. I think I think actually kind of stayed shy and away from actually building a mobile application and making sure that the current site was as responsive as it could be. So you can currently upload content. You can, I guess you could select, I haven't tried it. That's a good question. I haven't tried selecting content like a picture off my phone if I'm trying to upload content but I imagine that functionality might be there. If not, I'm putting in the backlog now. Yeah and I think I mean again because we practice this agile methodology so we launched the initial website from scratch. Like there was no previous website in October and we're trying to use a lot of the feedback we get from users about the new features we include. So there's lots of really cool things that we can do here but we're trying to make sure that it's based upon what people are interested in doing. So Ian has got his ear to the ground in the community and is looking out for what really is gonna help grow this community online. So again, I think there's tons of potential and if we find out that people really wanna be uploading photos on the fly all the time then that's definitely something we'll explore but we're trying to do it based upon what the demand is so that we can build a community that people are excited about and engaged with. And there's preparecenter.org. Hi, I work at Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and we've worked with form one on several projects, some data visualization, the stories kind of thing with urbanreproductivehealth.org which you might be familiar with and I know like they've done some really, really cool stuff with that and our team, the technical assistants that go out periodically into the field and do trainings and this kind of stuff they often hear a lot of stories and so one of the things we're trying to do now to help encourage the development of these stories is to train them to collect that kind of stuff because they hear a lot of the stuff when they're out there and people may know about the site and they may think it's really cool and they all get around to it at some point but it can be a little intimidating and stuff and so I know one of the things that they're doing is trying to help encourage that and curate that process a little bit more but the, so I just thought I'd mention that but I also have a question in you we're talking about like low bandwidth areas and this kind of stuff, are you doing anything, I know this is mostly about sharing and cooperative work but are you doing any work in offline mode at all, with any of your stuff because I know that's something that we run into a lot where there are just certain areas that people have little to no connectivity and we have to have a certain amount of our materials available in an offline format. Yeah, it was something we had considered initially, I think it wasn't as feasible in terms of what we could do in the way we thought of the first phase of development and I guess we still have kind of questions around a little bit, maybe not taking the whole site offline but allowing people to kind of collect together bundles of materials and be able to save those and there's desires too to be able to kind of print things that are related or put them all into a PDF so I think we are interested in strategies that let people identify content and maybe bundle that somehow. It's not something that we've been able to kind of have a clear vision of how we would do it exactly at the moment but we certainly kind of understand the need for it and I guess we're trying to understand too like how people, we probably need to understand better too how practitioners use mobile devices like I think we're, the Red Cross has a lot of work with apps for example that are really focused on individual households and individual small businesses in terms of giving them apps for preparedness measures but thinking about how people are kind of being practitioners or champions in their community and how we're helping them to organize activities. It's kind of a different type of activity and understanding how much people do that on mobile devices, how much they're doing that on another kind of a computing device. I think we still need to understand better too like what's the kind of need and how are people using these tools for this kind of practice and these kind of resources at the moment but we're definitely interested in the area so we'd love to kind of keep in touch and especially since you're very local to us that would be great. And then on the story sharing side, I mean we've certainly had lots of feedback too around the needs to kind of incentivize the process and to think about even kind of a little bit of competitive contest elements to get people to submit stories and offer I mean some kind of enthusiasm for that so we're actively looking into that. It's a feature we kind of just launched actually a few weeks ago so it's still something that we're looking to kind of roll out and build up momentum on. So. I was just wondering if you could say a little more since you were starting from scratch if you could tell us a little more about the resources library and how you went about building that and setting it up in a way that it's gonna allow it to grow over time. Very broad, I'm sorry. Chas, you wanna take that one or? Sure, and we must have been on the same wavelength cause I actually pulled up the resource library as you were talking so. So the resource library as you can see it gives the ability for the user to be able to actually add a resource. I'm gonna actually pull up the dev site because I have a dev user account in there that I can show you to kind of help talk about this a little bit more so I like the resources. So as a user if you are a member of the site or if you're a member of the community when you go to the resource library you actually have the ability to click on add a resource to be able to create a resource and you can see you can be able to add a title, description, some of your basic fields that you might think of when you collect the form but also being able to select the type of resource, the topics that it might relate to as well as being able to choose the language that you actually want the resource to appear in. And then the ability to actually upload files, create links to make some external resources and save those as well as to specify whether this is kind of an example resource or a lesson resource that a user can run with. So the vision of this was being able to kind of collect information that was not in a non-story format. And as this information was growing, being able to give the end user the ability to quickly be able to find the information they're looking for by utilizing solar, like I said, to filter by the resource type, to filter by the topics, as well as be able to filter by the language. So for instance, I'll just choose French here. And this should pull back 10 results and these results while they've been tagged as French, sometimes may not always be in the French. So this is one of the other kind of challenges in a community site that you've opened up to a user is just because they've chosen the language to be in a particular language, we're still relying on them to be able to actually go and put the content in that specific language so that it can be easily found or be what the end user is expecting. So resources is sectional site that can really, really grow with the community. One of the other things too, kind of revolving around resources was a subject of topics which is more kind of detail-oriented. And in fact, we were actually looking at, in a third phase, kind of revamping how topics work and kind of reorganizing how we drive the users to particular content, especially topics and resources. And the resources themselves, we wanted to be able to kind of interleave with the different topics. I mean, so it's set up right now too that they're related by tags, you know, and you can assign topics too. So we're trying to build out some of the semantic relationships of the resources to other parts of the site. Another piece, actually we've done some work on but we never actually released yet was a piece too, to look at kind of using a gazetteer to identify location names and the resources. Like so when you link to or upload a document, it's like searching through and finding location names and trying to build out some of the data sets that, you know, by people pulling together these resources, you know, we could look and have a better idea of, you know, what geographic areas are covered in this set of resources and steer people, even if they didn't tag it specifically, that we could use information in the content of the file, you know, using a gazetteer to go ahead and then like identify, like a lot of people to search using mapping tools or using, feeding the actual locations back into the tags also on the back end. So these are things that we kind of worked a little bit before the launch but we're getting too tight on the launch dates at the time, so we set it aside but it's a piece we need to come back to. I think we're very interested too in like how can we use the information that's in the resources and other kinds of interesting ways, you know, for visualization and do a lot of people to see what pieces, what tools and guidance might be most useful for them. And then the other question I guess around connecting to other sets of resources that other organizations may maintain and something still we're keeping kind of an eye on. We have early aspirations for that and we'd like to come back to it at some point but part of it again is like demand-based, like how much other organizations see that as a useful feature also. But pooling resources, for example, the UN has a site called Prevention Web that also collects a lot of similar kinds of resources. So we're trying to see how we could better merge and link, you know, these sets of pooled resources in that sense, you know, we're quite interested in. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how much human resource, how much human effort or what kind of a team you have behind sort of editing, cleaning up, curating the stories, resources, et cetera. Yeah, we're actually probably overreaching on lots of things. I mean, the center I work with, we have actually just the six full-time staff. We're growing a little bit now with a set of different sets of fellows and interns that have been working with us. But we have a relatively small team on this sense. So, you know, I've been doing most of the kind of project coordination, other people on the team have been contributing. We're really happy to have Renata join us now, you know, in this community manager role to help us do this and build out this more. I mean, at the same time we've been reaching out to this larger network within the Red Cross and within external partners that can contribute, you know, either stories or can contribute resources, contribute topics. So a lot of the process is actually into that outreach to try and find people that know about this topic or they have a good example, you know, of implementing it. So, I think that's also, I was just gonna say, I think that's also one of the things that's like that we're trying to keep in mind with the limited human resources as we try to, you know, continue to iterate because, you know, all of the features and things that folks are suggesting here are really, you know, important. I think could provide a lot of value to the community, but I think the number one goal right now is to get people creating accounts and just participating so that we can start farming out some of the ownership of the community to them and then we'll have a lot more potential to really, you know, start doing more, you know, technically, you know, interesting things so that we can have the manpower to be able to support those. Right, sorry, just to follow up. And what's the sort of the expected throughput on with those secretaries? I know that some of these things are fairly new, but in terms of the number of stories, number of resources for the six people to handle, I'm just curious. Yeah, I guess in the original vision, as Mikhail was saying, we are hoping that we can draw on this wider network that will also help kind of review and vet materials as well. And certainly even in the kind of different areas of work, you know, if it's things like, I mean, there's a lot of interest in the Red Cross right now, for example, in disaster risk financing and insurance and micro insurance. You know, it's an area that relatively few people in the Red Cross have direct experience with. It's like when we try and, if we get suggestions about that of resources or stories, we're really trying to go out to people that we know have more expertise in the area. So it is a lot, we're really trying to see this is kind of a resource for this wider network, but also drawing on kind of, hopefully some inputs and responsibilities coming from that side as well. But yeah, something we have to kind of figure out and balance more. But it has been a constraint for us so far. I think that we have a relatively small team and that we have other things happening at the same time. So I think this has been one of the challenges with the site actually, that we haven't been able to do as much promotion as we originally wanted. And this whole question around how to engage this existing network has been, there are opportunities for it, but it's, you know, we're not starting from scratch. We need to play a lot of internal politics. I've been the Red Cross also, it seems often like from the outside, like it's a single organization that has branches in 189 countries, but it actually worked the other way around where it was kind of more built up. Like I was saying in the beginning of the talk from this grassroots interest that formed these, these clubs that became these national societies and then, you know, now we have this federation over top, but there's a lot of negotiation, a lot of politics involved in lots of it. And that's just inside the Red Cross, you know, as we begin to work with external partners. So yeah, there's a lot of still work involved in this kind of aspects as well. More than we hope is necessary in the future. So hopefully, I think part of it too is having this kind of site, we're hoping we'll kind of inspire people, you know, to want to share more. You know, I think people, it's not been the culture up to this point. So hopefully we can kind of build a bit more of a tipping point on that as we go forward. Any more questions? All right, a little housekeeping here before we go for the day. Evaluations will be up after Drupalcon's over. So if you please make sure you go and evaluate the session you heard today, we'd really appreciate it. I just wanted to thank Ian for coming into Drupalcon to help speak with us on the case study. Michaela for taking some time out of her schedule as well. And most of all, you and the Drupal community for supporting not only American Red Cross, but supporting us developers as we work on somebody's really complex site. So thank you, appreciate it. And we have case studies up here if you want more information about preparecenter.org and also a list of open career opportunities. Thank you.