A highly motivated core group of ‘hubbers’ is moving beyond the traditional ‘community centre’ model to develop a wide range of facilities and activities with neighbourbood connection and resilence in mind. “Creating, crafting, cooking, skill-sharing, repairing, recycling, upcycling, and making great ideas happen” has already attracted MSM attention, and more activities are anticipated as the hub space and culture grows.
The hub has been no less ambitious for its online community building. And we’ve been in from the get go, designing branding with Bauhaus influenced typography, and developing a site with capacity for community building.
The dynamic duo of Drupal CMS and civiCRM is proving to be a great foundation to connect the physical and digital realms. We’ve worked with the hub’s own IT constituency provide a front end for a system very much geared to providing access. Quite literally in this case: here CiviCRM is used to manage doorway swipe card access for members –’ freeing up core hubbers from consierging and enabling more community focus.
What you see is just a beginning, and with funding from the Local Board we’re now embarking on expanding the site’s simple activity-based community profiles to become semi-independent microsites each with their own online tools and membership, via Drupal’s powerful Organic Groups ecosystem.
Built as it is on open source foundations, once some key milestones have been reached we will in turn make this holistic system available to other communities. Meanwhile, if thats of interest to you or your community, don’t hesite to get in touch.