Centre for Social Innovation: Scaling Community

The Centre for Social Innovation is a social enterprise with a mission to catalyze social innovation in its home base of Toronto and around the globe. Begun in 2003, the centre has grown from a shared working space to a key part of Toronto's social enterprise movement, providing home, inspiration and cross-fertilization for hundreds of organizations with a social mission.

In late 2009, the Centre approached Blackfly to help finish building new components of their website. These components are a key part of their current scaling up - moving manual processes onto the web to streamline administration and at the same time provide tools for the member organization and individuals to colloborate online as they were already doing in person.

This project is already challenging for the complexity of these requirements. In addition, at about this time the new OpenAtrium Drupal distribution was reaching maturity, so we recommended using it as a platform to build a separate intranet/community site.

The new site came into production in early 2011, and the community site came online soon after.

The community site was seen in the wild almost 10 years later, largely due to a custom web application that I wrote for room and resource reservations by members that worked so well it couldn't be easily replaced.

Credits for the visual design go to Thomas Cheng of http://www.themovement.info/

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