Partner Review New Platform

To: The Communication Initiative Partners
From: Warren

Best wishes. At the Partners meeting in London 12 months ago there was a very clear direction to renovate The CI’s online platform. I had outlined that our strategy was to wait till Drupal 8 was available. But as that timeline was uncertain, you strongly encouraged us to do the platform review and redesign over the coming 12 months. I am sure you have been following developments. Over the next few weeks I will highlight, for your review and comment, various elements of the new design. Please do provide your feedback and ideas into this private group where only people registered to this Partners Group can read and contribute. (There is of course password recovery should you have forgotten!)

By way of an overview we have redesigned and rebuilt the platform as a fully integrated community – network member profiles, search and connection; groups and communities; filtered/faceted search processes; knowledge summaries; polls and other surveys; ratings of knowledge from user perspectives; spaces for the work of each partner; theme site spaces for priority development issues; revised navigation process; Classifieds (jobs etc); videos; rolling news; social media integration; and, much more all on one single integrated platform. And of course the look and feel has changed also!        

The context for the new site development is 240,000 individual user sessions over the first quarter of this year from 190 countries (eg Kenya 8,862 user sessions in January to March).

In response to this note, please do provide any overall feedback that you may have on the new platform. We would very much welcome your inputs and ideas from your perspective. This incudes any glitches or problems. Fully integrated platforms such as these can be tricky beasts!

There will be more from me soon on specific elements of the new design.

Thanks - Warren