Digital Opportunity Trust Community

Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT) is an international non-governmental organization that connects people and technology globally to promote locally driven social and economic development. DOT begins by teaching people of all backgrounds transferrable skills through customized train-the-trainer programs; then, learners link the programs to practice by designing projects that apply their knowledge to the issues impacting their local communities. Since its inception over seven years ago, 174,000 people have participated in community and education development initiatives and 2 million volunteer hours have been mobilized. DOT is supported by strong partnerships with multinational agencies such as Cisco Systems and IBM.

The Challenge

DOT is committed to the ideals of open source - the free sharing of ideas and the transfer of knowledge for the greater good. This approach was the key driver behind the early adoption of The Plone® Content Management System as the backend for both the corporate website as well as the organization's internal collaboration system. Although the initial costs of the open source platform were low, the ongoing development cost, lag time between feature changes and overall complexity of the system became challenges for the organization. Program participants faced demoralizing delays in low-bandwidth environments, each upgrade required a systematic evaluation to determine if the changes could be supported and the constant reengineering of the system threatened to funnel money away from community development efforts. Something had to give. With DOT partners pushing for cost reductions through the use of technology and participants eclipsing DOT using their own commercially available social networking sites, it was time for a change.