Grassroots.Org has chosen the Davis Community Network's SimpleSites facility as one of six winners of a Grassroots Techie Award. The awards, given for "pioneering contributions in nonprofit online applications development," were presented at the 2007 NTEN (Non-profit Technology Network) Conference. (Article on Christine.net)

SimpleSites are ready-to-install website templates created especially for nonprofits.  They are designed to be easy to operate and maintain —important for nonprofit organizations, often short on resources and high on turnover.

SimpleSites bring many of the features of a full-fledged Content Management System, particularly collaborative creation of a site through web interfaces, to smaller organizations in a much-simplified format. Groups using SimpleSites may create site styles in minutes, then add content with automatic search, navigation, calendaring and news features. The sites are usable, accessible and offer advanced features like RSS news feeds, form-building, list-subscription and video casting. DCN teaches semi-monthly classes on SimpleSite creation and maintentance, and there is extensive on-line documentation.

DCN and SimpleSites

The Davis Community Network (DCN) assists local government, non-profits and grassroots community organizations with needs for Internet content and services. We provide web page development assistance and hosting, training, free e-mail, list servers, and other applications.

A common need of our non-profit client organizations is to be able to build a simple, easily maintainable, web site with good usability and accessibility features. DCN ’s Web Team developed SimpleSites as an add-on module of the Plone Content Management System. Its purpose is the easy creation of an organizational web site by any competent computer user, even if that person has no experience in the area of web page creation and design. The application has been through two versions since 2001. We have designed this application to be simple and practical yet also somewhat sophisticated. The application is sustainable because it is easy to maintain with a minimum of technical knowledge. This is an important feature for non-profits, which typically face frequent volunteer turnovers, a situation many grassroots organizations have to confront.

Full-featured, open-source Content Management Systems like Plone offer many desirable features for non-profit organizations that help them deploy more sophisticated, and useful, web sites. However, such systems are generally complex to deploy and demanding of server and system administrative resources. The SimpleSites mechanism allows many organizations to operate under a single umbrella Plone installation. Thus the overall costs of deploying, maintaining and training for the CMS are undertaken only by the umbrella organization. The mechanism also exposes to client organizations only the CMS features that they are most likely to use.

Since DCN is providing this as a free service to regional non-profits, a great many other organizations are already using it. The SimpleSites mechanism has also been bundled as an open-source Plone “product, ” a modular add-on to the Plone CMS, PloneMiniPortals. It ’s available for download in the Plone products collection. A public subversion repository is used for source code maintenance. This is an open-source software project, and the software will remain free.

Seventy Davis area non-profits have each been given access to a SimpleSite. We hear from the organizations that have already deployed their SimpleSite that their web presence is tremendously beneficial in allowing them to serve their members or clients more efficiently; they also truly appreciate the ongoing support - and the lack of advertising on the pages.