CivicActions

Amnesty International launched a total overhaul of their website on December 10th (World Human Rights Day). The new site was developed in Drupal, with CRM components provided by CiviCRM and was integrated with a sister project to migrate Amnesty International's ancient lotus notes database of 50K+ reports and press communications to alfresco (http://alfresco.org), an open source document management system.

The project was a six month endeavor which provided numerous challenges both technical and organizational. Being a massive NGO which a global presence and a very renowned brand, the staff at Amnesty International had to be incredibly detail oriented, and the coordination required that more than two dozen people were working on the project directly.

I won't comment on how important Amnesty International's work is in the world, I'll leave that to Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International:

• We believe human rights abuses anywhere are the concern of people everywhere.
• We pledge to harness the power of individuals to galvanize action for justice and equality for all.
• We are outraged at the betrayal of our leaders, and are determined to hold them to account.
• We commit ourselves to creating a global culture in which every person can realise their human rights.
• We will carry the message of hope of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to every region of the world in the 60th anniversary year.

- Message from Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, on the occasion of International Human Rights Day 2007.

Many Thanks

I will get into the technical implementation issues and the solutions we came to in another posting for the geeks later this week when I get a little more sleep, but for now, I just want to thank and acknowledge everyone on the team who made this project a fantastic success:

(gets sappy now, if you're not into that type of thing, I suggest you go read a sports blog).

Stephanie Pakrul

What can I say, Steph is a whiz. When she gets up in the morning to get dressed, this is how she plans her outfit: #steph { top:#FFFFFF; jeans:#0249EB } .rain #steph { border-top: 1px solid woolen;} Fastidious is not the word. The most difficult part of this project, by far, was the theming. Steph, along with her partner in crime, Chris are the masterminds behind a site supporting right-to-left, Arabic, x-browser compliance and level 2 accessibility. Their work on this project is a benchmark for others to follow. Besides that, she gave me sushi and is a total sweetheart. (http://stephthegeek.tv).

Jenn Sramek

Half den mother / half mafia style cleaner, Jenn comes in and gets the job done. She's willing to learn anything and throughout this progress went from being a damn good project manager to an application specialist, documenter, QA Engineer and trainer. All whilst building relationships, doing the books and fastidiously capturing the details to keeps us on track with our past and future. We all love you Jenn!

Henry Poole

Thank you Henry for providing the support I needed, and the trust I required. You've been nothing short of classy throughout. Getting to know you has been a joy.

Sam Lerner

The all-rounder, the MVP, Sam did everything and anything on this project from complex API integration with alFresco to slick looking CSS / XHTML, hard core JavaScript, and a bit of server administration on the side. Besides being so smart it's annoying, he's actually an animator, ( Great Turtle Race), a graphic designer and a composer.

Wim Mostrey

Thank you Wim. You've been amazing throughout. Wim handled the most complex parts of the site, using two experimental modules - workflow-ng and asset, growing / pushing their limits into revolutionary functionality for Amnesty International and hopefully the Drupal community at large. Since the pace of this project was rather breakneck, Wim hasn't had time to contribute most changes back as of yet, but CivicActions provides a stipend to developers for time to do this, and he will be starting the contributions this week.

Chris Fassnacht

Chris, you've been a total professional through and through. A prince, and the perfect tonic to my stressed out rantings. The sound of your reassured, calm and humble voice on the phone embarrasses me into being human again. We could not have done this without you, your diligence (masochism) to rooting out every stupid bug M$ ever put in IE is astounding.

A.J. Roach

A.J. Roach, the famous folkstar, "until he makes it big as a programmer," has made it big as a programmer, so I guess he can quit that soulful high lonesome country thing now. Well done PFP, and thanks to good friend.

Hailu Dyami

Hailu is the embodiment of "by any means necessary." Doing whatever needed to be done, from QA to configuration, theming and php, Hailu embraced every challenge with full commitment, dedication and grace. Thank you.

Ian Bettinger

Ian provided the quality assurance, and his task was thankless and impossible. With changes coming rapid fire from the various departments at AI and a large team of cats to herd, Ian's work was never very straightforward, but he found several critical issues in spite of it and there is no way we would have launched on time without him.

Rob Purdie

Speaking of rapid changes :) Rob was Amnesty International's Project Manager. He had the unenviable task of trying to keep this gigantic tanker on path and on budget through many personnel and scope changes. His ability to extract compromise and create buy in has steered us smoothly through some rough patches, plus, I lived on his couch a couple weeks this summer, thank you Rob.

Daryl Manning

Director of I.T. at Amnesty International, Daryl is completely allergic to mediocrity. Even after his staff had all left for their homes, Daryl was up with my on launch night, Sunday night, fixing last minute bugs, looking at top, reading logs. A model to every lucky person working in his department, Daryl has been nothing short of legendary.

Michael Chik

Michael is the man. This guy saved the project. Michael has been the center of the universe for Amnesty International. He was the guy with his feet on the ground and from the moment he came on, he was running. Almost every piece of content in all four languages you see on the site was touched by Michael. I am honored to have worked with him.

Kieran Wyatt

Kieran, mighty with the pen, was responsible for a majority of the content on the site (and that is A LOT). Taking to heart the importance of presenting Amnesty International to the world, and succeeding brilliantly, Kieran is also a gem of a guy, a total gentleman through and through.

Piotr Poznanski

Piotr had the unenviable task of managing the dreams, wishes and rants of 400+ Amnesty International employees who had been fighting an antiquated CMS, CRM and document management system for over 10 years. As product manager Piotr is an example of composure and professionalism, and although we were forced to butt heads quite often, I consider Piotr a close friend and a mentor to me. Congrats to Piotr and his partner Dorota on the imminent birth of their first child, Laura!
also..

A special thanks to everyone else involved in this effort: Damon Rand, Eugene Connor, Alex Scott, Arthur Foelsche, Owen Barton, Ken Jordan, Ron Akanowitz, Issa and a very special thanks to Doug Green who saved the day at the eleventh hour (actually, it was about 3am) by providing us with his views_fastsearch patch to fix a nasty bug that was killing the server. Being part of team is great, isn't it?

And finally, thank you to my parter, Vinitika for being with me through many long nights and loving me unconditionally. You bring out the better man in me, and I promise, he's getting bigger because of you. Thank you Baccha. I love you.