• If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Activities report 2009

Page history last edited by Pier Andrea Pirani 13 years, 4 months ago

Dgroups 

Annual Report 2009

 

Introduction

This is the very first year report prepared by the Board of the Dgroups Foundation. Our intention is to be as transparent and informative as possible so all members and other interested people will know what has been going on within the Foundation. We welcome any question or recommendation from readers.

 

Dgroups is at a crossroads. During 2009 many of you had to deal with many technical problems during the migration and afterwards. However most of all these issues have been resolved thanks to the work of the hosting organization: WA-Research. But there is still much to do on the improvement of the Dgroups tool and the getting alive of the “Dgroups community”. It will take some time to get Dgroups alive in the way we evisage, but we are sure we are getting there step by step.

 

We especially want to welcome the new members which joined during this year, this encourages us to go on with the strengthening of our community.

 

This report highlights the main activities and development that took place in 2009 - looking at both the Dgroups platform as well as the partnership.

 

Dgroups 2.0 platform build and migration

The new D2 platform took longer than expected to build and migration posed its own problems. The full functionalities and usability of the web site was not really complete but, faced by increasing down time on the old platform, we accelerated the migration knowing that the new platform’s email tools were at least reliable. The original platform staggered on until early 2009 when it was decommissioned. On February 13th 2009, we ‘closed’ the original Dgroups installation hosted in Canada – switching to the new platform. By February 20th, 2009, all the data was fully migrated to Switzerland, hosted by WA Research. 

 

It took about 4 months for DGroups Partner organisations to prepare their groups for migration to the new platform, and a lot of “house keeping”, review and clean-up of the existing D1platform was carried out. As migration completed, WA Research reported that: “As of today we have 122,187 users registered in 2,227 ‘active’ and 440 ‘archived’ Dgroups. Note that some 17,707 of these users do not seem to belong to any of the migrated groups, and we know that some email accounts are no longer active). Every day we receive between 1,800 and 3,200 messages for dgroups.org, and send out between 50 and 90,000 to members. So, despite a large cleanup of Dgroups late in 2008, the total graphs continue their generaly upward trend – this may change however after we further review and remove inactive email accounts."

 

Technical hosting - WA Research  

The old platform was plagued by instability and users were increasingly critical. It was a relief in early 2009 when the new platform was ready and migration could begin. Since then, email reliability has been very high thanks to the continuous efforts of WA Research to get email failure down to zero. There is still quite some work to be done on the web interface, but this is been taken in consideration and a redesign of the Dgroups web spaces in planned by the end of 2010.

 

Dgroups Foundation established in early 2009

After the early years, when it was incubated by Bellanet/IDRC as a project, Dgroups members decided during the period 2007-2008 that a legal entity was needed at the heart of the partnership. Through several meetings members agreed that Dgroups should be a membership association, with one class of member organizations. 

 

On 20 February 2009, the Dgroups Foundation was established in the Netherlands. The intention is to keep the Foundation small and smart. It will have a Board elected from members of the partnership. More operational activities like platform hosting, support, and communication among the members will be contracted to others. Member roles and responsibilities are set out in the governing statutes and regulations.

Partners meeting 2009

On 15 and 16 April 2009, the members of the Dgroups partnership met in the Netherlands, the first  members meeting since the one in The Hague in January 2007. Over 1.5 days, the representatives of the Dgroups members organisations discussed the following agenda points:

  1. The new platform, its usability, hosting, and support provisions;
  2. Priorities for further platform development and enhancements;
  3. Election to the Foundation Board, discharging the current executive committee;
  4. Strategic directions for the coming years;
  5. Management, coordination, financing arrangements for the coming years.

 

The report of the meeting is available at http://dgroupshelp.pbworks.com/agm09_report.

 

Management of the Foundation

As defined in the Statutes and Regulations of the Dgroups Foundation, during the 2009 Partners' Meeting the first Board was elected. This allowed the interim executive committee to disband and hand over management duties as of April 2009. The organisations elected were: HelvetasHivosICCOIICDSula Batsu.

 

The Board met on 16 April 2009 and 29 September 2009. The minutes of these meetings are available for Dgroups members on the Dgroups wiki. 

 

Coordination

In August 2009, The Dgroups Foundation contracted Euforic to carry out general coordination and support roles. The contract identified 4 tasks for Euforic: 

 

  1. Relations and communication with members and other interested parties
  2. Dgroups Help Wiki maintenance
  3. Support to the Executive Committee/Board of the Dgroups Foundation
  4. Preparing and supporting the Annual Assembly of Partners

The narrative and financial report on Euforic Dgroups Coordination support is available on the Dgroups Help wiki.

Due to the closure of the organisation, Euforic had been forced to terminate the contract half-way its implementation. All the necessary actions had been undertaken to ensure proper termination and hand-over of accounts and activities.

   

Dgroups members and membership 

We responded to incoming inquiries regarding the (new) Dgroups partnership and Foundation.

 

Letter of Agreements and invoices were sent out to all current partners of the newly established DGroups Foundation. In addition, three (3) new partnership agreements were finalized with The Global Mechanisms, the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) and the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA)

 

Updates on the partnerships and platforms were published on the Dgroups blog.  

 

Some 7 organisations expressed their interest in joining the Dgroups Partnership and becoming members. Some of these have been testing the platform and even if they found it interesting and suitable to their needs, in most cases they considered the membership fee being be too hight for their means. This was partially addressed by having groups created by members for third parties.

 

DGroups general information, communications, help and support 

With the help of Euforic and working with UN Online Volunteers – we set up and the Dgroups help wiki in the 4 languages Dgroups is running on: English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. These help files are meant to provide users with first-level help for using and administering Dgroups. It also contains information on the partnership, its current membership and how to join. Between July – December 2009 we finished the work on translations and did some maintenance.

 

We also created 2 private spaces on the Dgroups wiki, one accessible only to members, the other only to board members. These are used to follow-up relations with (potential) members and post reports of meetings etc.

 

In 2008, we set up the Dgroups blog to share Dgroups plans, progress, news and updates. In 2009, the blog was populated with 11 stories to communicate to Dgroups members, users and the generic public about the new platform, the technical developments, the new governance structure, the Partners meeting and the new organisations that joined the partnership. In total, the blog received 8187 views.

 

Financial issues  

Financially the year 2009 was both a simple and a complicated year because of the transition of the administrative issues from ICCO to the Dgroups Foundation. This means only part of the spending has been done by the Foundation itself. The larger expenditures were still the responsibility of ICCO as the referring contracts were signed with this organisation.

 

We have chosen a ‘Socially responsible and sustainability oriented’ bank with which to open a bank account (the Triodos bank in Zeist the Netherlands).

 

Foundation and ICCO Activities

The main activities under the direct responsibility of the Foundation in 2009 consisted of:

  • The creation of the Dgroups Foundation
  • Opening of the bank account
  • The organisation of the Members meeting 2009
  • Negotiations about and signing of the new agreement for the hosting of Dgroups with WA-Research
  • New arrangements with Euforic Services about  coordination tasks
  • Collecting the membership fees

 

ICCO has mainly worked on the finalisation of the project with IDRC (concerning the migration of the Dgroups system to WA-Research).

 

In the overview of expenditures and income we will make a clear distinction about what figures correspond to the administration of the Dgroups Foundation on one hand and ICCO on the other hand. 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.