Featured Bryght VPS Site, ChangeEverything.ca was named a Webby Award Official Honoree. Congratulations! If your Bryght Light or Bryght VPS site has won an award, please let us know!

FROM ChangeEverything.ca is named "Webby Award Official Honoree" | ChangeEverything.ca:

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ChangeEverything.ca has been named as one of the 'Official Honorees' in the 11th Annual Webby Awards. Of the more than 8,000 entries submitted to the 11th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an 'Official Honoree'. This honour signifies an outstanding caliber of work. This is a huge and very exciting for us!

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Rob Cottingham's followup to my ChangeEverything.ca Featured Site post gives us more insight into the success of the ChangeEverything.ca community. Read the whole thing!

FROM ChangeEverything.ca: Setting the stage for participation | Social Signal:

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So for your online community to take off, you have to design for participation, starting with your concept. In the case of ChangeEverything.ca, that meant the simple idea of allowing people to think about the changes they wanted to make, and then blog about them.

But don't count technology out. We needed a clean, easy way for users to link blog posts to changes... and that's where some techno magic comes into the picture.

Enter Khalid Baheyeldin, one of the greats in Drupal development. We contracted with him to create the custom module that lets users link pieces of content ("nodes" in Drupal-speak) in lists – and Drupal, Khalid, our client and Social Signal being who we all are, the resulting module (with a little extra work by Khalid) was released to the community.

Between Khalid's work, some solid advice from Bryght on data architecture and Courtney Miller's theming and interface tweaks, the result was a platform that was designed from the ground up for participation.

So yes, there was some technical mojo, but all of it in the service of, and strictly applied to, getting people to take part in the community. We were setting a stage – which is just a venue for the actors to shine.

And shine they have. Kate Dugas, the site animator, has been brilliant, in turns charming, warm and provocative. The community members have responded in kind, to the point where I now regularly turn to ChangeEverything.ca myself for ideas and inspiration. Community, enabled by technology: that's what this is all about.

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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.