I’m Matthew Knight – head of the technology group at Child’s i Foundation. I’ll be talking to everyone at the meetup this evening, but if you’re not able to make it, or weren’t listening, here’s the basic gist of what I’ll be saying.
My role is to support the charity’s activity when we’re looking to do things online, or where digital tools are involved. From the very start, we’ve been a charity which makes full use of available digital tools – as many are free and cover a great deal of our needs.
We also create our own tools and work for the charity to support or create new campaigns. There are a number of digital projects we’ve developed in the last 18 months.
Firstly this website, which was originally built upon Wordpress, a simple but flexible blogging tool. We recently relaunched an updated version of the website which allows to add custom functionality when needed. Involved in this were designers, developers and writers, all working together to create the site.
We also built the ‘Buy a Brick‘ campaign, which involved a team of designers, developers and project managers creating bespoke code. The campaign has raised so far over £10,000 pounds for the charity. We’ve also had a number of charities contact us wanting to use the wall for their own campaigns.
All the work we create within the group, we aim to open source the code once it is completed. This means that we put the code back into the public domain, so other charities and developers can make use of the effort we’ve put into Child’s i, so other organisations can benefit from the work we’re doing.
The team currently is relatively small, we have an amazing developer Patrick who built the bulk of the work for the Buy a Brick, Rory and Ronan who developed the front-end of the Wall animation and interaction – but everyone involved is giving their time voluntarily, and as they’re such talented developers, they’re also in great demand from their jobs or other clients.
We’re hoping to speak to more developers and designers who want to get involved in the group, working collaboratively on projects like Buy a Brick so we’re not reliant on any one person.
As the code is open sourced, I think the projects we create are attractive beyond just the initial challenge of creating something which works well and is fun or engaging for the people to use it – its an opportunity to really help lots of people.
We’re looking for developers and designers, people who know Ruby on Rails, HTML, PHP, Actionscript and Flash, Javascript, Photoshop, illustrator, anyone who has a bit of experience in creating digital work would be really welcome.
We’ve got a number of projects which we’d like to talk to people about, which if you’re interested, come and chat to me after this.
- Continued development of the Wordpress site over the next 12 months
- Continued development of the Buy a Brick app. We want to make it ready for open sourcing, add some reporting tools, integrate it with our databases, and add a few new bits of functionality.
- Creation of a Shopify shop for the Baby Shower. We’ve created a shopify install which needs some design love, and some data entry and testing.
- We’ve recently purchased a database to keep track of our activity called CommonGround. We need people to help with the structure and maintenance of the database, as well as creating tools to automatically update the database from campaigns like Buy a Brick.
- We’d also like to create a Totaliser on the website, to help people keep track of how much we raise each year.
- We want to develop some tools for the Undress for Uganda events
- And generally, we want new ideas and suggestions to how the website and anything we’re doing digitally could be improved or work harder.
So if you or any of your friends or friends of friends are developers and designers, I’d love to hear from you. Come and find me afterwards, and we can chat about how you can get involved.
If you’re shy – my email address is matthew@childsifoundation.org, so drop me an email, or pass it on if you think others would be interested.
Thanks!
