The Open Source Concept: A Short Personal Essay on the New Volunteer Center Website

The new website for the HWMUW Volunteer Center now has a life!

You’re lookin’ at it!

As the main programmer and designer behind the scenes (a 50+ volunteer!), I thought those involved with this site and other volunteer centers might like to learn just how we put together this site.

Jane Royer, the director of the Volunteer Center, asked me to explore some possibilities for developing a site that would better feature the center’s wide range of services and connections within the community. We had the these initial aims:

• Seamless integration: The primary Heart of West Michigan United Way site is itself a recent development and functions as a content management system for the local organization. The Volunteer Solutions site primarily manages data—posting volunteer opportunities and signing up for volunteer opportunities. Both sites use proprietary software, and both are locked up behind a formidable wall of permissions and proprietary (company secret) code.
• User Interaction: A second aim was to build a site that would invite content input from local agency directors, the Johnson Center for Philanthropy, the Grand Rapids Community Foundation, the the HandsOn Network and the United Way Volunteer Center workers at all levels. Indeed, we wanted to build a site where everyone with news about volunteering in the West Michigan community had a place to publish.
• Social Networking: A third aim was to build a site that was friendly to the many new social networking functions—Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.—so that the vast amounts of information that come through the volunteer center could be easily shared with others.
• Ease of Use: Finally, a fourth aim was to build a highly functional, flexible content management system. The desire here is to have a system that ordinary users can use and build without a lot of technical help.

The aim of seamless integration meant that this new Volunteer Center site should provide the same (or better) quality in the user experience. We didn’t want the user jumping from one web world to the next. Navigation, language, images, color schemes, photography, and design theme needed to prevail across the sites. This effort began by matching up the banner—the match could still be more consistent—and creating a navigation system that made sense across sites, if not as an exact replication, at least as a kind of evolution from one site to the next.

The project thus began with Drupal, an open-source web platform widely used in corporate, nonprofit, and government organizations. The “open-source” concept does not always mean “free” (although it often means that too); “open source” more importantly describes an approach to software development that relies on community cooperation and non-proprietary sharing of information, problems, and success—quite an appropriate philosophy for a regional volunteer center.

One advantage this platform has for the West Michigan Volunteer Center is that they have now plugged into an international team of programmers, developers, security experts, designers, and so forth that freely share their work back with the Heart of West Michigan United Way Volunteer Center. Is there a security patch for the website? It’s posted immediately at Drupal.org. All web platforms must keep pace with security updates, but with Drupal, these patches are free, easily applied, and the international community is vigilant. Proprietary vendors must charge for security patches (or just don’t provide them) and they may or may not be responsive to design trends, new technology, feature requests, or general help. With propriety vendors you get what you pay for—and most nonprofits can’t pay much. A quick tour of the sites using Volunteer Solutions alone reveals the shortcomings in design and function of most volunteer center websites. What’s more problematic about this state of affairs is that most centers have nowhere to turn but to the vendor for help—and this center has sometimes waited months for a reply.

The Solution

The result we have here does not abandon the Volunteer Solutions (VS) database. We have however limited its use to what it does well—manage data. We themed the “skin” of that site to match our new site—which is itself a slight evolutionary move from the primary united way site. This required manipulating two files in the VS side—the index.html file and the index.css file. Careful tinkering with these files made it possible to fit that site to the template we were using in the new, Drupal-based Volunteer Center (VC) site. It was not easy, but like most chores in technology, it could be done much more quickly a second time.

The VS site could be abandoned altogether, but this would involve creating custom content types on the VC side that would allow agencies to post opportunities and users to sign up for these. We experimented with this and a quick prototype was developed, but for the sake of time, we put that project on hold. It can be done, however, and the result would provide an even greater degree of flexibility, usefulness, and seamlessness.

The current site is just a start. It provides easy access for affiliates and directors to add news stories to the front page. It organizes “feeds” from the VS side and displays them for the user on the VC side. It provides ways for Volunteer Center personnel to build new content. Through the use of what Drupal calls “roles,” the site administrator can make it possible for any one person or group to have the correct level of fine-grained permissions to create content or build on the site. The open source concept does not put all the responsibility in one set of hands—it spreads the work around, invites participation, shares responsibility, and advocates against the hording of information and knowledge as proprietary.

Others have helped and are helping with the ongoing development of this site: Carrie Smith, Charles Archie, Jessica Gonyou, and Jane Royer.

It’s time now for others to keep the open-source ball rolling. . . .

--Dan Royer (a 50+ volunteer on this project)

These views are my own and not necessarily those of the Heart of West Michigan United Way or its Volunteer Center.