Community Website in Drupal for Indo-Swiss BEEP Project

The Indo-Swiss Building Energy Efficiency Project (BEEP) is a bilateral cooperation project between the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) of the Swiss Confederation, and the Ministry of Power (MoP), Government of India. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) is the implementing agency on behalf of the MoP.

The overall objective of the project is to reduce energy consumption in new buildings in India. The specific objective is to build capacities and knowledge of builders, architects, engineers, labs, institutions and others, in the area of building energy efficiency in India by utilizing/adapting Swiss experience and expertise. BEEP does this through knowledge products, training and capacity building programmes and events. The events, called Integrated Design Charrettes, educate builders about the energy design strategy for a project.
    
The BEEP project wanted to build an invite only Community of Practitioners (CoP) and an open for all Community of Interest (CoI). These communities would consist of people associated with the real estate sector, primarily Architects, Builders, Engineers, Developers and Government Agencies. BEEP wanted to set up a website with features such as Content management, Social engagements, Document management and sharing, advance searching, forums, groups etc. The objective was to engage and facilitate interactions within Communities of Practice (CoP).

Requirements

BEEP wanted the website to be developed on an open-source platform and work as a social network for a focused group of experts. On the website BEEP wanted to able to enroll expert practitioners identified by them and have the facility to run managed groups, which could be public or private (invite-only). These expert practitioners would be asked to contribute knowledge products which could be uploaded in various formats such as DWG, DOC, PDF, etc. The members of the group in which documents get uploaded would be notified about the availability via activity feeds or email. These documents would serve as preparatory material for events and discussions. Similarly, other documents and media generated during events, could also be made available to groups. The website also had to enable event registrations. It also had to be responsive. The website also needed to have slideshows, with automatic resizing of uploaded images.

BEEP decided to chose Drupal because of its reputation as a widely used CMS by the non-profit sector. BEEP also recognized that Drupal could enable efficient handling of multiple user groups for various kinds of content.

Srijan was chosen as the Drupal development services partner for this project because of its reputation as Drupal agency as well as its proven track-record of working with non-profits like Ashoka, Oxfam, i7san and many more. Srijan’s deep knowledge of modules that catered exactly to what client was looking was key.

Solution

The design of the website was done by Srijan’s partner, Design for Use. Srijan, Design for Use and BEEP worked in a highly collaborative mode to streamline the requirements. All the website requirements were discussed and defined through workshops.

The website was developed in Drupal 7.

Creation of Groups: Srijan used Organic Groups to create public and private groups for the website. Private groups are invite-only groups, which are visible only to the members. Public groups are visible to all. A user who is not logged in at the website can only view the groups, not comment.

The website has its own login mechanism as well as allows a user to log in using his LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter accounts. Videos and pictures can be added as comment in groups. The website also lets users to share content using social plugins. A slideshow has been created to display a slideshow on the website.

Benefits

The site has made conducting events and their promotions and collaboration on ideas very simple. It is being used to spread information about various energy efficiency related competitions and events being organized by BEEP. For example, BEEP has conducted a competition for design of External Movable Shading Systems to reduce solar heat ingress in buildings. Professionals like architects, product designers, HVAC engineers and others participated in this competition.

Seven seminars and three industry trainings have already been conducted by BEEP and promoted through this site. All the collaterals and content generated are now accessible to the relevant group members.

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