Blogs

As a result of its latest award Te Whare is now available on the Internet Movie Database for online viewing.

In the period that Richard Green's film - Te Whare, The House, has been eligible for awards it has been shown at seven film festivals:
* Honolulu International Film Festival (US)
* Denver International Indigenous Film Festival (US)
* Metro International Film Festival (US)
* STEPS International Rights Film Festival (Ukraine)
* Wairoa Maori Film Festival
* Aluta! Film Festival (South Africa)
* University of Northampton’s International Community Film Festival (UK)

It was awarded a Special Commendation at The University of Northampton’s International Community Film Festival in 2008 and was recently chosen to receive the Silver Lei Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the Honolulu International Film Festival.

We've been especially lucky with sponsorship lately. Thanks to the Manukau City Council, Christine was able to attend the very large Community Economic Development Conference in Waitakere last week. Lots of content, including input from overseas, which stimulated our thinking about how social enterprise activities can help make the community sector more financially sustainable. Once the organisers have recovered a bit, all of the presentations will be available on the website.

Admittedly the 100 plus people at the Drupal South Conference were more than a little biased towards the Drupal Content Management System for creating websites ... but the 3 days in Wellington confirmed for me that Drupal has amazing potential for empowering community organisations with their own affordable and manageable websites.

In a Content Management System the users put in their own content.

You can start small and simple and more and more functions can be added as you need them - without feeling overwhelmed in the process. But the best part is that everything is free and open source and being constantly improved on by hundreds of enthusiastic contributors all round the world - who do it because they love it.

We're moving ahead with our website learning! This weekend I'm off to a DrupalSouth conference for people who use the Drupal Content Management system to make websites (that's us here at AWEA) and, just to mention some well-known ones so you can see what I mean:

• Amnesty International
• Wellington NZ
• Sorted
• New Zealand Government
• UN World Food Programme
• Universal Music

We've been making smaller more-affordable-to-community-groups websites ...