“Oxfam Great Britain”:http://www.oxfam.org.uk/ needed a tool to help them collaborate online with their geographically dispersed team and some of its partners during the “G20 event happening right now”:http://www.g20.org/. 8Trees, our Drupal-based project management/knowledge management tool, acts as the perfect base layer for this kind of internal communications space, so we turned on a custom version for Oxfam. Here’s a snapshot of the river of actions happening across a group on the site:

!http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3657/3407584926_67edeff950.jpg!

Oxfam does a ton of outreach and organizing with bloggers to make sure that bloggers’ voices are heard around big events and important human rights and poverty-related issues. They have been using our news tracking tool, “Managing News”:http://www.managingnews.com/, for the past nine months to track what’s being said online about their issues. For the G20, they needed something new to help them and their colleagues organize a team of 50+ bloggers from around the world who are covering the G20 event. Their team of bloggers and organizers have been using 8Trees’ blog, calendar, and wiki features to plan the event, as a backchannel during the event, and as a platform for further networking with each other after the event. Check out their work at “G20voice.org”:http://www.g20voice.org (built by their internal Drupal team).

Oxfam will be testing 8Trees out in other projects in the coming months as well. 8Trees development continues to been driven primarily by our internal needs for working directly with our clients. Oxfam using 8Trees as a private online hub to help them collaborate on projects will help us make the underlying system better and further push the limits of what is needed to build a great open source collaboration tool set for large teams. Yes, that means we are working hard towards an official open source release. Sponsors welcome. :)

8Trees is built on Drupal and it’s unique functionality is powered mostly by “Moshe Weitzman’s”:http://cyrve.com/ “Organic Groups”:http://drupal.org/project/og module and our “Context”:http://drupal.org/project/context and “Spaces”:http://drupal.org/project/spaces modules. You can learn more about Context and Spaces on “code.developmentseed.org”:http://code.developmentseed.org/home.