During 2008, Euforic continued to provide overall coordination support to Dgroups - a leading discussion and community platform for many development actors (see 2007 report).The main focus of 2008 was the platform itself and its migration to a new system and host. Early in the year, it departed IDRC for IGLOO – who hosted the ‘D1’ platform throughout the year. In mid 2008, the Dgroups Executive Committee selected WA Research to build the new ‘D2’ platform. It also recruited a small migration team to assist in the transition, due to be complete in February 2009.
The task was to build a new platform and migrate more than 2500 groups, some 110,000 individual users, and more than 40,000 shared resources (and in the process identify which groups were active, which could be archived, and which deleted).
By the end of 2008, the beta D2 platform was ready and many groups were already migrated in a test phase. The new platform immediately won over users with its fast and reliable email functionalities, a welcome improvement from an increasingly shaky D1 platform (which was already past its best).
The Dgroups blog has reports and milestones on the migration and build processes.
Alongside the platform migration, the Executive Committee worked to establish a Dgroups Foundation that could take on the independent ownership of the platform – and be the focus for the Dgroups partnership.
Euforic acted as coordinator and sub-contractor to Dgroups, nurturing the partnership and catalyzing the various steps along the way.
We look forward to having a more reliable platform, with added possibilities to mash Dgroups into other communication tools used by Euforic and its members.
by Peter Ballantyne