Dgroups Activities Report 2011

 

This report highlights the main activities and development that took place in 2011 - looking at both the Dgroups platform as well as the partnership.

 

Dgroups platform: Hosting, development and support

As in previous years, WA Research, which is hosting Dgroups in Switzerland, has provided a reliable operational service throughout 2011.

 

WA Research has also entirely financed the redesign of the Dgroups platform and website. On 20 June 2011 the long-awaited redesigned version of Dgroups was opened up at http://next.dgroups.org to a tester group composed of dgroups partners, administrators and users. They provided WA Research and its developers feedback and input on the new platform before actual production launch in September 2011. This redesign took much longer than could be foreseen but it was a big technology and design change - almost a complete rewrite of the

platform.

 

With the ongoing development of the next Dgroups platform, we have discontinued the maintenance of the Dgroups help wiki as channel to provide users with first-level help for using and administering Dgroups. A help file integrated with next Dgroups is being developed by WA-Research. The Dgroups redesign community has been actively used by Dgroups creators, administrators and advanced users to communicate and exchange with WA-Research on technical issues and problems with the new web platform.

 

At the moment of writing this report (June 2012) a new, almost final iteration of the next Dgroups platform has just been released and most of existing groups and users have already migrated and make use of the redesigned system.

 

Currently Dgroups counts 140363 registered members up from 139.336 accounts registered until March 2010 and 2290 discussion groups created all time.

 

Dgroups management and coordination support

In the course of 2011, the Board of the Dgroups Foundation met five times (4 times online and one time face-to-face, after the Partners Meeting in Rome). The minutes of the Board meetings are all available for on the Dgroups members page of the Dgroups wiki.

 

The Board continued in its role of overall management of the Dgroups Foundation, working on administrative and membership issues; collaborating with WA-Research to ensure progress on site redesign; organizing the 2011 Partners Meeting; defining criteria and mechanisms for the election of new Board members. Also in 2011, Euforic Services was contracted to support the Dgroups Foundation and its board in its mission to sustain and promote the Dgroups partnership.

 

The composition of the Board changed during the year. Sula Batsu resigned from the Dgroups Board and Partnership in February 2011. Further, in March Riff Fullan communicated he could not be fully engaged in the Dgroups Board anymore and he would step down at the 2011 Partners meeting. Finally, as of 1st April 2011 Maarten Boers stopped his function as ICCO employee.

 

Rob Witte took over Maarten’s role in the Dgroups Board as ICCO representative and Dgroups Treasurer. Additionally, at the 2011 Dgroups Partners meeting the partnership council nominated 3 new members to the Dgroups Board: Giacomo Rambaldi (CTA), Kristin Kolshus (FAO) and Neil Pakenham Walsh (on behalf of INASP). Caroline Figuères (IICD, Chairman of the Dgroups Board) and Hapee de Groot (Hivos) maintained their position in the Dgroups Board.

 

A special thank goes to former Board members Margarita Salas (Sula Batsu), Riff Fullan (Helvetas) and Maarten Boers (ICCO) for serving as Board members in the first elected Board of the Dgroups Foundation.

 

Dgroups members and membership

As in 2010, also in 2011 the membership of Dgroups continued to fluctuate and decline. While in September 2011 the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) joined as new Dgroups member, some organisations decided to leave the partnership during the year, such as Sula Batsu, or communicate they would not renew their membership beyond 2011, such as SNV and the Global Mechanism (IFAD).

 

This negative membership trend, also present in 2010, is of primary concern for the Dgroups Board and the rest of the Foundation. This was discussed at length during the partners’ meeting, where a scenario exercise looked at what actions could be take to counter this negative trends. Some of the features that have been developed in the next Dgroups platform, as well as it overall design and look and feel, will definitely help promoting the system. Further, there are Dgroups assets¹ that are highly valuable and marketable for recruiting new partners.

The Dgroups Board remains confident that, once the the new site is in place, more time and resources can be allocated to marketing and outreach, as well as organizing trainings and capacity development events for Dgroups users in the South and the production of self learning and promotional material. All this, together with a possible introduction of a graded membership system, is perceived to be beneficial to the recruitment of new Dgroups members and the enlargement of the number of actors financially supporting the Foundation.

 

In terms of communications with existing Dgroups partners, the Dgroups wiki has been maintained as reference and archive for all documents and procedures related to the life of the Dgroups Foundation. All minutes of Board meetings, as well as documents and reports relevant for the administration of the Dgroups Foundation are available, archived and organised onto the wiki.

 

During the year, the dg-partners list had also been used to inform Dgroups partners of new developments on the platform and partnership, as well as collect feedback, ideas and suggestions.

 

Partners meeting 2011

The 2011 Dgroups Partners meeting took place in Rome on 27 September 2011. This half-day meeting was organised at IFAD in the context of the Second Global Agriknowledge Share Fair, taking advantage of the crossover of Dgroups and KM4Dev members, whose main email group uses Dgroups. Moreover, the Share Fair attracted a wider development audience which could provide an opportunity to promote Dgroups and convey the message that Dgroups remains a unique and active initiative in international development.

 

Caroline Figueres (IICD) chaired the meeting and Pete Cranston and Pier Andrea Pirani (ES) provided logistics, communications, facilitation and reporting. Damir Simunic from WA Research and Pete Orme (working on the design of the new platform) joined in for the session devoted to technical development.

 

Nine out of the 22 member organisations forming the Dgroups participants council took part in the meeting. The attendance was perhaps lower than anticipated. However, organising the annual gathering of Dgroups partners alongside a major international event still proved to be very beneficial. The participation throughout the whole Share Fair of several Dgroups Board members, as well as WA-Research and Euforic Services, offered a unique opportunity to gather informed feedback from a high number of users and further promote Dgroups amongst the development community.

 

Besides the business meeting and the discussion on updates and plans related to the Dgroups platform, the partners meeting devoted quite some time to the discussion of Dgroups futures. A specific session was designed to combine and adapt two facilitation methodologies - appreciative enquiry and ‘future backwards’. In two groups, participants listed Dgroups assets, then they shared and combined them. From this basis, the two groups defined a ‘nightmare’ and a ‘dream’ scenario for Dgroups 2 years from now. Finally, they described the steps that lead to each scenario and reflected on what can be done to influence the path – focusing on immediate, medium and longer term actions.

 

As emerged from this exercise, Dgroups has some clear and strong assets. It is low bandwidth and its reliable email system is its killer app. It has a specific and defined niche in terms of user-base and content related to development cooperation. Likewise, Dgroups is a well established brand, backed by an equally established and renowned group of international actors, some of which are big organisations. Moreover, it values especially privacy of the users and it can be trusted in that the members organisations. Last but not least, Dgroups supports multiple languages and it has a large administrator list that can be a excellent source of users' support.

 

On the basis of these element, the Dgroups Board has started defining an action plan that aims at:

1. Continuing developing a reliable, simple, open and accessible platform

2. Strengthening the support system to provide and document usability and usage support to administrators of groups

3. Recruiting sufficient members to cover all the recurring costs.

 

A comple report of the meeting is available at https://dgroupshelp.pbworks.com/w/page/41651866/Partners%20meeting%202011

 

Outreach and promotion

During 2011 Dgroups started once again to be a more ‘out and about’. In September Saskia Hermsen (IICD) presented the use of Dgroups at the International Cross Media Festival PICNIC. In the same month, Dgroups featured on the ShareFair agenda with a technical session during Day 0 of the event and a session on 'Dgroups going mobile' organised by Damir Simunic of WA-Research.

 

Both events presented good exposure to an international, wide audience, promoting the added value of Dgroups as a global public good, a reliable and effective communication tool and a unique partnership of development organisations.

 

The Dgroups blog has been used to document these events and, especially around the Annual Partners meeting, to try and involve in the conversations also an audience beyond the current Dgroups members.

 

Financial issues

In 2011 due to declining membership, income from fees declined to € 69,300, which includes the first four month period of our new member SKAT, on behalf of the Rural Water Supply Network. This amount is € 18.700 lower than budgeted. That we nevertheless ended with a negative result of 13,700 only is due to the fact that we did not invest in Dgroups redesign as budgeted: WA Research has shouldered all investments in redesign.

 

As we are confident that the new design and functionality of Dgroups will attract new partners, we also hope to avert exhausting our reserves, which at the present rate of losses would otherwise happen in 4-5 years time.

 

The board decided to charge the loss of 2012 to the continuity reserve, which at the end of 2011 was € 76,872.

 

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1 See partners meeting report - https://dgroupshelp.pbworks.com/w/page/41651866/Partners%20meeting%202011