So what is Dgroups?

During a recent webinar organized in partnership between FAO-Dgroups, Saskia Harmsen from the Dgroups Board gave a short introduction to Dgroups, what it is, the organizations behind it, and why it is the platform of choice for online communities of practice and communication for development.

(see also the slides used in the webinar)

Dgroups as a Partnership

Dgroups is a partnership of development organizations (UN agencies, bilateral agencies, NGOs) who collectively support global communication for development. Our shared vision is a world where every person is able to contribute to dialogue and decision-making for international development and social justice. At the moment, Dgroups has 15 Full Partners, 9 Associate Partners, and 3 Project Partners.

The Dgroups partnership is formally constituted as the Dgroups Foundation, a non-profit foundation registered in 2009 in the Netherlands. The Dgroups Foundation is owned and administered collectively by the Full Partners.

Currently, there are three different Dgroups membership options, each with different levels of financial contribution and different rights. This means that the spaces for dialogue and decision-making are opened up and information is shared much more broadly than in the silos – perhaps technical silos or organizational silos that exist within our sector. This is something that we all believe in and that we can make happen – by being part of the partnership.

Dgroups as a platform

Dgroups is also a web-based platform that hosts, powers and connects the groups. The Dgroups platform is hosted and maintained by WA-Research, a small company in Switzerland that has for 20 years been building and refining its communication software, CommunityCloud, driven largely by the needs and priorities of Dgroups.

Dgroups Partners and WA-Research collaborate to ensure the platform meets a diverse range of needs for online groups, communities of practice and communities of interest. Instead of each developing their own in-house systems to create and manage online communities, the Dgroups Partners have joined forces and resources to develop a common tool and system that can also support cross-organizational communities of practice and foster collaboration across different organizations.

Some key figures are useful to give a sense of the scale of the Dgroups platform:
[bulletlist]

• At the moment there are more than 700 communities created on Dgroups – they take different shapes and different forms, from public to private, closed or open to the public, moderated or unmoderated. Communities have also many different sizes, some having many thousands of members while others are very small technical groups with just a few people. It all depends on the specific needs of each group.
• Overall there are almost 300,000 registered users on the Dgroups platform – ranging from members of international organizations or government agencies to local and national NGOs, interested individuals and professional groups. So there is a very diverse user base in all of the different communities.
• The platform enables the delivery of more than 400,000 email messages daily – this is the power of the Dgroups platform as many of you will have experienced. The Dgroups platform works better than any other communication tool for meaningful, global, multi-stakeholder communication.

• Dgroups is very simple to use for administrators and for end-users – Users do not have to log in to a web-based platform to participate. Instead, they receive and send directly as part of their everyday email experience. No technical knowledge is needed for users to engage in dialogue – everyone knows how to send and reply to an email!
• Dgroups is multilingual – the user interface is available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian. Users can just use the tool in the language in which they are more confident with.
• Dgroups is flexible and scalable – each Dgroup workspace allows for customizable individual profile members and they can be grouped by tree or customizable email delivery preferences from immediate delivery to daily delivery to weekly summaries. There are also RSS feeds and an open API that allow you to integrate a Dgroup into your own web page.
• Dgroups is non-commercial and respectful of privacy – this is very important for many users and administrators. Unlike other services such as Google Groups or Facebook Groups, on Dgroups there is no advertising and data is not being shared with third parties that are then using it for their own purposes. This is one of the very big reasons why people and organizations opt for the use of Dgroups.

Dgroups as a global public good

Last but not least, Dgroups can be described as a global public good – with the Dgroups Partnership making the platform available to actors across the development sector and thereby hosting a large family of discussion groups related to international development. This is a real strength and an opportunity of Dgroups.

Making the case for Dgroups

So if your organization is looking for a solution for online communities, why should you consider joining and using Dgroups?
[bulletlist]

• Because Dgroups is about appropriate technology – the focus is not about building fancy technology but about what works and what is sustainable over time, not just in terms of financial sustainability but also and especially in terms of access and use.
• Because Dgroups is an effective and flexible tool – group administrators can focus on the content and do not need to spend time with technical setup, or supporting users in answering technical questions. This way, group administrators can really focus on communication, collaboration, information sharing, etc. – basically, to get their work done.
• Because of its shared ownership model – the different Dgroups partners invest just a fraction of the resources that they would need to develop and maintain a similar system in-house.
• Because Dgroups can contribute to reducing the duplication and fragmentation of online communities, which are a barrier to effective development and social justice

The agenda of the meeting was organized in three main parts:

• Dgroups business meeting – Presentation by the Dgroups Board on progress in 2017 across the 9 work areas of the Dgroups work plan and proposed objectives for 2018, followed by questions and discussion.

• Technical development – Presentation from WA-Research on features recently released and currently in the pipeline, followed by questions and discussion;

• Dgroups case study – A presentation by Sean Furey and Saskia Harmsen on how the Rural Water Supply Network has been using Dgroups to support communication and knowledge exchange.

The full report of the meeting is available for current partners on the Dgroups wiki [login required].

You can also view the presentation, prepared with inputs from the different Board members, on priorities and progress in the 9 work areas of the Dgroups work plan; and the presentation from Damir Simunic and Joe Canda (WA-Research) on recent technical developments and priorities for future work on the CommunityCloud platform, the software that enables Dgroups.

FAO is a long standing partner in Dgroups since the early days of the platform, back in 2002-2004. For FAO, Dgroups is an established tool for communication, collaboration and networking in teams and projects, and with external stakeholders and partners. Indeed, there are over 50 FAO dgroups currently active on the platform, with over 27,000 members. We’ve reported before on the success stories emerging from these groups, such as the “Food for the Cities” multi-disciplinary initiative.

The project grant was made available by FAO in the context of their support to Communities of Practice in the field of Livestock, particularly networks and organizations working with pastoralists and community of livestock diversity experts. The grant financed WA-Research work on the Dgroups calendar function and the email attachments; a part of the funds available also were used to support the overall platform improvement. As a result, the calendar now displays as heat-map, also including past events; attachments replaced with links in emails are now more visible for users.

A second project grant was agreed early in 2016 with UNISDR, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. As part of this grant, UNISDR joined Dgroups as a Full Partner and Dgroups provided support in the set up and facilitation of their online communities and groups. Additionally, the grant covered for direct support by WA-Research to their PreventionWeb portal and the integration of Dgroups with their contact directory.

Both these projects show an increasing commitment into Dgroups, and the benefit of partnership and collaboration for the further improvement of the platform. We hope other members will be able to provide similar support and resources in the future.

ECDPM and Dgroups are partnering to pilot a series of three free webinars to learn the ins and outs of the Dgroups platform, the basics of online community building, and tips and tricks that are at the heart of online facilitation.

Last week, the first webinar in the series took place and looked at technology – with a specific focus on the Dgroups platform.

This platform is well known in the development community, with more than 700 active communities, 150,000+ active users, working in International & intergovernmental organizations, Government agencies, National and international NGOs, ICT- and knowledge focused institutes. Over 400,000 email messages are delivered each day through the Dgroups servers, and over 50% of these emails are exchanged with & within African countries.

The core and killer app of Dgroups is email. Every user can contribute to a community simply by sending email. This is the most inclusive way of participating in an online community, because everyone (or, at least, everyone who has an internet connection, even if this is only occasional) has email and there’s no learning curve. It just works.

In addition, each community on Dgroups comes also with a webspace that includes archive of discussions, members’ profiles, library of resources and other tools and functionality that the administrator can turn on and off as needed. WA-Research, the organization hosting and maintaining Dgroups, is constantly improving the platform in response to Dgroups members’ requests. Not all features, sometimes even the most simple ones, are known and used by users and administrators. So content-wise this session was about the different things groups administrators need to know about using Dgroups via email, and the (many more) things they can do with the website.

http://www.slideshare.net/dgroups/using-dgroups-in-all-its-features

The webinar went well and was appreciated by users. We had about 20 participants. Feedback received in the post webinar survey was also positive.

If you have missed this webinar, you can access the webinar recording or download the slides we used in the session.

The second webinar in the series will take place on 22 April 2015 and will focus on Developing and facilitating your online community. In this session you will learn where to start when launching an online community, and how to enhance members’ engagement. Registrations will open soon.

From the over 226 discussions in the [redesign] community, here is an updated list of top issues and requests, in no particular order:

• Search should  be improved
• “Make public” function seems not always to be working
• Incorrect building of strings in email that results in Messages in a thread not always being filed together on the web archive
• Allow multiple email addresses for each Dgroups user account
• More granular approval policies (toggle option for admin messages to not be moderated)
• Better statistics needed (users, downloads)
• More/less detailed user profile needed?
• Metadata for groups (in progress)

In parallel with (and in part as result of) the discussions around present and future platform development, you may have noticed in the past months a range of improvements, some big and some small:

• Option to upload your own banner
• Option to choose colour theme (also impacts suggested banner images)
• Option to send an custom welcome email to new invitee when they join a community
• Password reset text added in Spanish
• Calendar date sorting changed to newest first
• Within member list, option to allow members to see each other’s email address
• Basic stats download at /admin/stats/downloads.csv (available to group admins only)

If you are working with Dgroups and are interested in discussing how to improve Dgroups functionality, please let us know and join us in the [redesign] discussion group: it is important to hear what issues are key for you, and what is working well for you. Often [redesign] members are an excellent resource for ideas and solutions, as is the platform host.

And if we missed any recent improvement, let us know in the comments section below!

by Kristin Kolshus and Pier Andrea Pirani

We have been using these data and presented them in a live, interactive visualization using Tableu Public. You can see it at this link and inquire it directly. The image below is a screenshot taken for the live visualization.

As you can see, Dgroups users at large form a truly global community of 167, 691 users across 232 countries and territories. Almost 2300 groups have been created on the platform to-date. Many of these groups were designed for a specific time-bound purpose and have fulfilled their function. The platform currently hosts 723 active groups,  – where ‘active’ is considered a group that has recorded at least one message in the previous 365 days period – equivalent to almost 40 groups for each Full Dgroups Partner.

It is also interesting to look at the distribution of Dgroups members across regions and languages. Unfortunately data here are not complete – every Dgroups admin knows that it’s not always easy to get members to fill in their profile online – and indeed around one third of users have not indicated any country of residence.

However, it is very important to see that, amongst Dgroups users that have filled in their profile, the majority are located in Africa. Even if not surprising, as we know from previous data the the great part of email exchanges on Dgroups happens within the African continent, this is  a further confirmation of the role that Dgroups plays in facilitating the access to development conversations online.

Participants moved from a common definition of what Dgroups is and what it stands for. As the tagline in the logo suggests, Dgroups is about development through dialogue. Our vision is a world where communication for development is accessible to all and has maximal positive impact on international development.

The main part of this face to face meeting was dedicated to explore Dgroups’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and the actions to take forward. As some of the Board members said, the meeting was very constructive and useful.

From discussion that emerged from the SWOT analysis, it become clear that the first and most obvious strength to leverage upon is the Dgroups partnership, the group of development organisations that support this initiative. So what efforts should be taken to maximise this strength and to make sure that Dgroups partners become also active ambassadors and contribute to the further enlargement of the membership base, and therefore the financial sustainability of Dgroups itself? The ideas that were discussed included:

• Redesigning of the Dgroups home page at dgroups.org and the landing pages at individual group level;
• Publicizing the openness of existing discussion groups;
• Putting more effort in networking and communicating with existing and potential partners, in order to increase the membership base and ensure the financial sustainability of Dgroups;
• Working on Dgroups branding and effective online presence that reflects this brand;
• Making more use of the Dgroups blog to showcase how Dgroups is put at work in different contexts and for different purposes;
• Defining and communicating to Dgroups members the advantages of the cost-sharing strategy which underpins Dgroups existence.

Some of these actions are already in motion.

Weaknesses included a lack of a marketing strategy to engage new Dgroups partners, and the Board will take new measures to promote Dgroups and enlarge the partnership. Related to this is the opportunity to reach out to new partners in the South.

A threat is that current budget cuts in the development sector are forcing partners to reevaluate their budgets. But this can also be seen as a good investment by current and future Dgroups partners, as it offers a flexible tool for communication, designed particularly for low bandwidth, that can complement and in some cases replace the need for expensive, face to face meetings.

We also discussed progress on the development of the next Dgroups platform and a number of outstanding functionality issues, including the redesign of the Dgroups homepage and landing page of individual groups; the completion of the users’ interface in the different languages that Dgroups supports; the possibility for groups administrators to edit the email footer for each community; improved statistics at group level.

We shall work together with WA Research to solve these issues by the end of June 2012.

The meeting was well attended, with half of the Dgroups partners participating and actively engaging in the discussion on Dgroups present, its value and concrete plans for future activity and development.

In the first part of the meeting, Hapee de Groot and Rob Witte from the Dgroups Board reported on 2010 activities and finances. In the discussion that followed, Dgroups partners addressed the issue of how to enlarge the membership and market Dgroups amongst development organisations. Dgroups remains a unique initiative in development cooperation, partly because it is email based and so is suitable for those still numerous areas where Internet access is expensive and unreliable,  [image source=”http://dgroups.hapee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/6210053197_58e42b1387_z-300×225.jpg” align=”right”] but partly because we are independent and so not subject to the same regulations and constraints as Google and other commercial platforms based in the US.  These factors, together with the current site redesign and the budget available for further technical development, will definitely help promoting Dgroups in the months to come.

As part of the business meeting, Dgroups members also agreed to enlarge the Board to  6 members and confirmed the nomination of 3 new Board members . This was also the chance to thank outgoing Board members Riff Fullan (Helvetas) and Maarten Boers (who stepped down last April) for serving as Board members in the first elected Board of the Dgroups Foundation and for their great contributions.

In the second part of the meeting Dgroups members had the opportunity to meet with Damir Simunic of WA-Researchto discuss updates and plans related to the Dgroups platform. The site redesign is almost complete and some existing groups have been already migrated to the new version. There are still some bugs currently being fixed and some more groups will be migrated in the next month to further assess if the platform is robust enough to proceed with the full migration. On the basis of the feedback and information received, the Board will decide on a date when the complete migration can be started.

In the last part of the meeting, Dgroups partners looked into Dgroups futures. The session was designed to combine and adapt two facilitation methodologies – appreciative enquiry and ‘future backwards’. In two groups, participants listed Dgroups assets, then they shared and combined them. From this basis, the two groups defined a ‘nightmare’ and a ‘dream’ scenario for Dgroups 2 years from now. Finally, they described the steps that lead to each scenario and reflected on what can be done to influence the path – focusing on immediate, medium and longer term actions.

The complete report of the meeting is currently being drafted and will be circulated to members soon in the coming days.

For the  sessions, Damir Simunic of WA Research prepared a video to show the new look and feel and demo some of the new functionalities of the site.

In his presentation of the new platform, Damir highlighted the following elements:

• The process of  developing and deploying the new platform has been taking much longer than expected; employing world-class designers was a learning process. Nevertheless, we believe the final result was worth the wait.
• The redesign is completely focused on making it easier for administrators to manage groups, as admins are the primary users of the site
• The technical objective of the redesign is to simplify the user interface (for example, number of clicks for common tasks are reduced, ‘announcements’ feature is now merged with ‘discussions’) and modernize the platform to use the most modern browser technologies available (HTML5, CSS3, etc), while still working for older browsers.
• In the process, we wanted to make Dgroups beautiful for admins, to make them proud and happy to show it off to their colleagues.
• Thanks to new technologies, the platform elegantly scales from large desktop screens to mobiles form factors – Dgroups’s first entry into mobile space;
• The video show off some of the new user interface features like drag&drop attachments and pasting; large user avatars; significantly simplified means of adding new members; modern tabbed design, and many more

.

In the Q&A part of the session, some of the issues discussed comprised the following:

• Track status of messages: this will be possible with the new design, similar as it is now to track invitations to groups;
• Stats and tracking usage: This has always been high on any admin’s priority list, and the new design will provide the technical background needed to implement many of these statistics in the near future;;
• Improved options for content sharing: “hidden” urls for RSS feeds to allow server-side subscriptions without the need for passwords;
• improve Dgroups integration with other sites and platforms, a API will also be further development
• Compatibility with older browsers: The new site is designed to benefit from the most modern browsers. However, Dgroups has always been about inclusion, and it will also work on older browsers; obviously, features that only new browsers provide won’t be available on older ones.

We’ll soon provide the link to the test site to all Dgroups administrators. The date for the full roll out on the new platform will depend on the results of this test phase, the feedback received and the improvements required but if all goes as planned, by end of January 2011 the new site will be launched.

It is very important to note that the January launch is about modernizing the user interface – new additions will be coming continuously during the whole year and beyond.