Telecentre.org

Telecentre.org is a project of IDRC with the goal of encouraging and supporting "telecentre communities". A telecentre is the developing countries' version of a internet cafe or library - a place where you can go for internet access. The main telecentre.org website describes itself as a community of people and organizations working together to improve the social and economic impact of grassroots telecentres. In January 2006 I was approached by Mark Surman to help out with their Drupal site that had been set up the previous year. It was a self-admitted 'beta' site testing the limits of it's version of Drupal and was suffering from performance load and confusion about how to implement what they wanted. I helped out in various ways: tuning their Drupal stack on the server migrating the site from version 4.6 to 4.7 and simplifying the theme that was driving everyone crazy. Along the way I also worked on their "Drupal D-Groups" project that became the Drupal Mailing List Groups project did the bulk of the work to migrate the internationalization module from 4.6 to 4.7 and set them up with CiviCRM to do some neat things. In 2008 they attempted to farm out the server and Drupal responsibilities to a new outside contractor but after 8 months of too little progress they pulled the plug and passed the website project to Red Clay who migrated it to some proprietary CMS. I'll note that 12 months later they still don't have the multilingual capabilities they had on Drupal!