Drupal planet

A couple of months ago I was approached by Robert Castelo of Code Positive if I would be interested in working with Microsoft to build some useful Drupal tools for charities and NGOs. Since I work exclusively with charities as a Drupalista, there were no reasons to decline. I was also interested in getting in touch with Microsoft to know what they have to offer.

In October, I proposed an event called Practical Drupal for Small NGOs because I know some small NGOs that need a website, but they don't have enough budget to build one. These people usually have very interesting projects and do really good jobs. I thought it would be fun and practical to set up a regular Drupal event to help small NGOs build their websites.

Note we are not building websites *for* them. It's because I know a number of individuals and organisations who built websites for NGOs free of charge, but they worn out and completely abandoned those websites and stopped supporting. I didn't want to see that happen so I decided to ask NGOs to build and look after their sites by themselves, but we would do as much as we can to help them.

Following our presentation at Drupalcon Paris, Philipp and I have received almost an overwhelming number of compliments and positive feedbacks. Thank you for those who attended the presentation and I am very glad many of you have found the presentation useful :)

A number of people have also asked me to:

• a) make the slide available online
• b) share the names of books I recommend

The Japanese community is representing Drupal at OpenSource World, which takes place in Tokyo in July.

This is exciting news especally for Japanese Drupallers, as there has previously been no active offline communities in Japan that could represent Drupal at such events.