IWPR project

What is IWPR?

IWR aims to build peace and democracy through free and fair media.  They

• Establish sustainable networks and institutions
• Develop skills and professionalism
• Provide reliable reporting
• Build dialogue and debate

See http://iwpr.net/ for more information

High level aims for the project(s)

IWPR (the insitute for war and peace reporting) will look at ways that they can use CiviCRM with Drupal to help media outlets across the developing world become stronger, more professional, financially independent, safe etc.

Approach

They are looking at two ways to approach this.  One shorter term, and one longer term.

• A longer term community building exercise, where they look at how CiviCRM can be used to generate subscription revenue, build up a better picture of their audience, etc.
• A shorter term project focused around the Iraqi elections in which CiviCRM is used to help with the journalistic process, to collect contributions via crowdsourcing, etc.

Shorter term / iraqi elections project plan

1. identify two or three prototypes which would be attractive to media outlets and would demonstrate the power of a Drupal / CiviCRM solution.  See this page (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Iraqi+elections) for candidate prototypes
2. create prototypes (see Iraqi elections for prototypes).
3. identify candidate technical organisations, and client organisations happy to pilot the these prototypes
4. train the organisations in these prototypes, and support them in their use
5. evaluate these prototypes, feeding findings into the longer term project

Longer term community building project plan

1. survey business and media community building models across arab countries
2. identify technical partner or partners who are ngo friendly / an ngo to work with
3. train technical partner and prototyping with early adopter
4. roadshow to demonstrate some defined applications of CiviCRM (i.e. targeted mailings, subscriptions, contributions) to 'later adopters'
5. clients commit to adopting system over specified time period with specific targets.
6. explore ways to strengthen the ecosystem locally
7. Look at development of custom modules for media outlets
8. Expose clients to range of open source projects that might complement this project.

Training

A major part of this project would be to provide training to both users of a system and to a technical support organisation that could support this system.

The aim of the training is to create a sustainable ecosystem of users in the arab world that could support local projects, and become part of the CiviCRM ecosystem.

It is likley that this training would take place in ** or ** and would be focused around the pilot projects.  It would involve current CiviCRM developers and users and would aim to transfer skills and experience, so they could run training events themselves in the future.  (This approach has been trailed in the Europe where core team members came from India and USA to the UK and there is now a high enough skill level to be able to run these events in Europe)