17 Local Economies Set up in a Day

At the annual summer National InterSEL camp in Poisy France, we held a one-day workshop and set up our free tool for 17 communities; training community leaders to manage their activities and accounts. Local Economies were set up in Paris, Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand and others

A system of mutual help took form spontaneously and the day was very productive. The Trainees that see the practical benefits of CFtools, will be launching asap, in order to take advantage of the time it will save them. Others prefer to personalise more, persuade and train their members before launch. It's up to each community to make those decisions. We are simply the enablers.

These training days/weekends do more than just build capacity, they also pool precious programming resources and give us user experience input, as well as help us define feature priorities.

The next most requested feature is the ability to trade between groups online, and thanks to a group in Belgium, we are presently testing this mechanism.

Thanks to this sort of collaboration in Belgium, Switzerland, Ecuador and France, we will be migrating the 120 websites hosted on Community Forge's servers to Drupal 7 in October.