Nabuur
NABUUR, the Global Neighbour Network, turned 10 today!
To celebrate this fact, we've put together a timeline with NABUUR milestones, newsletters, videos and stories from the ground - showing NABUUR's development over time.
Looking back, these 10 years have been a continuous journey of trying, testing, often failures, successes, but (hopefully) most of all learning. But also a journey with sometimes rather unbelievable stories of perseverance, ingenuity and collaboration to overcome local challenges.
Of course these results would never have been achieved without the support from volunteers all around the world. On behalf of all the communities that have benefited from your ideas and efforts, I'd like to say a heartfelt"Thank you!" for 10 years of your continuous support!
I hope you'll enjoy a walk down memory lane!
Pelle Aardema
Click here to open the timeline in full screen. (goes to an external site)
Since 2005, Sushmita Lahiri, Local Representative of Kalna, has been teaching children at her own house. This week we received some very uplifting news.
Local Representative Sushmita Lahiri writes:
“School shifted from my house to its own building ! ! ! Yesterday, Tuesday the 5th of April 2011 !”
Sushmita writes she has been scrubbing off the old paint during her leisure time, and she was able to hire a painter to paint the first part of the building.
“The children are very happy in the new school! At this moment, only a part of the total building could be made fit for use. Please be assured that as soon as other parts complete and made ready for use, I will let you know!”
Congratulations Sushmita! We’re waiting for more positive news.
Read more about Kalna, and find out how you can help:
http://www.nabuur.com/village/kalna
Sushmita teaching at her house
Dear all, 
As we enter the holiday season and the year comes to a close, we’d like to wish you and your loved ones a joyous and peaceful holiday.
The past year has not been the easiest year in NABUURs history. At the beginning of 2010 we knew we had a difficult job ahead: changing NABUUR from a staff-run organisation to a fully volunteer run community. We’ve had to overcome a lot of difficulties, but at the end of the year we’re still together as a group of people who share the same purpose: putting their skills to use where they really matter.
Many thanks go to each one of you for all that you have contributed in this past year: by checking in regularly to see how things are going, by helping communities move forward, getting in touch with new volunteers, and in numerous other ways - Thank you so much!
It’s this sense of community that makes NABUUR work, and it shows:
- As a community, we’re now developing a new strategy for NABUUR, starting at the basis: by redefining NABUUR’s mission and vision, and taking a good look at what needs to be preserved or changed.
- For the occasion of International Volunteer Day, Local Representatives gathered some inspiring stories showing the impact of NABUUR volunteers.
- Last but not least, NABUUR facilitator Maria Zandt was awarded the “Online Volunteering Award 2010” by the United Nations Volunteers Programme, in recognition of her work with the community of Wakitaka, Uganda.
These kind of inspiring examples keep us focused and hopefully mark the beginning of a new and successful period for NABUUR.
Happy holidays, everyone!
On behalf of the NABUUR board and governance team,
Pelle Aardema
In between clearing out the office, different conferences and meetings (more about that soon) and the all social media efforts you’d nearly forget about the redesign. But it’s still ongoing!
Last month saw the release of a new demo site that has been used for testing the first bits (take a peek at http://demo.nabuur.org)
You’ll notice a few things:
1. The new NABUUR logo!!! I’m proud to present our new logo, which is fresher, brighter than the current logo. Also notice that we’re moving from .com to .org, which fits NABUUR a lot better
2. With the new logo, the colour scheme will also change. Brighter colours and a more contemporary style.
3. The pages are still pretty empty. This is partly caused by the fact that the site is in development. Right now only the first basic functions have been installed. When more functions are added, the pages will fill up. But, as one of the main reasons for the redesign is to make NABUUR easier to use, they should stay pretty 'clean'.
Testing the new site
A number of Local Reps have provided their feedback on the first user cases that were implemented: ‘Sign up as a Neighbour and ‘Register your Villlage’. At the same time the NABUUR team has been live testing the demo with non-NABUUR users, in order to get feedback on the user experience. The collected feedback already lead to improvements in the design. This method of testing (both face-to-face and online) will be used for all the functionality that is developed.
If you have a look, keep in mind this is not a finished site yet, but feel free to test the sign up process. Any feedback is welcome here.
Upcoming functionality
In the meanwhile our team worked on the Village’s project room. A first version should be up in the coming week.
Want to be involved in the testing? Leave a comment or send me an email at pelle [at] nabuur.com
Have you browsed around NABUUR this week yet? Noticed anything extraordinary? No? I thought so…
But an important change took place ‘under-the-hood’: the NABUUR site has been moved to bigger, faster servers!
The occasional visitor probably won’t notice the difference. The regular visitors and Neighbours should experience a better site speed, however.
Ever since the NABUUR Drupal site was launched last year, the speed of the site has been a point of attention. Frans and Kester pulled every trick they knew: PHP-errors, memcache, MySQL queries, 404-handling, Varnish and a dozen other ideas came to the table. And when all of that had been done (and helped quite a bit): let’s move the site to a bigger server.
Last Monday morning the operation took place: the access to the site was closed for 2 hours, it was made sure no postings were lost, the site was moved and then NABUUR.com was activated again, without any major interruptions. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of our tech team, I proudly present:
NABUUR at a higher speed!
For the curious techies: the site is running on 2 new servers now. The first one is a dedicated server for the database. The other dedicated server is the application/http server.
Type as fast as you can, our site can handle it ;-)