Act locally, think globally. That's one of the premises behind Bryght VPS site, ChangeEverything.ca. Community members (anybody in the Vancouver and Victoria, BC area) on ChangeEverything.ca submit "changes" (things they would like to change in their lives and communities -- implemented as a custom content type using Drupal's content construction kit) no matter how large or how small and the community works together to help accomplish those goals.

ChangeEverything.ca is illustrative of an online community truism: after you have a solid and reliable technology infrastructure like Drupal to build an online community upon, the social i.e. the people part of the community matters more than the technology part.

And the people part is hard to do even if you have done this before. Accordingly, the Vancity team (the organization behind ChangeEverything.ca), led by William Azaroff, did some very smart things. First, they hired Social Signal who have oodles of online community experience to coordinate the site and community design. Second, Vancity hired Kate Dugas who administers and nurtures the ChangeEverything.ca Community with a deft hand.

The result: since their launch in July 2006, the site has grown and prospered with over 986 members 350 changes, 650 blog posts, and 1050 comments.

What's the secret besides the combined punch of Social Signal and Kate Dugas and their incredible community of members? Kate says:

"The thing I love most about ChangeEverything.ca is its local flavour. It was a risk not making this national or even global, but the connections people can make and its real world impact is due to its being rooted in a specific geographical region, and that's the secret sauce."