I am a missionary and know many others who would love this. I have been fortunate that Josiah (flickerfly) is with my agency, so I am constantly going to him for help. I would be happy to help other missionaries with their sites or help you guys understand any of the field dynamics that might be important as well.
You guys continue to amaze me with what you do.
Jason

Yeah, this sounds real interesting. Most things like this I've watched actually end up not making it out the gate because they were building from scratch and didn't have a community behind them, but I look forward to what this community can do towards this end.

I'm thinking an install profile for Drupal would be the first goal, get all the views, and content types and the like put together and configured so it just happened at install. Then some stock templates that maybe took advantage of the color module and you'd be well on your way to way better sites than most missionaries already have.

An important thing to consider, while we're handing them these materials to work with, what is the follow-up? What training can be offered to show them how to produce quality content? Many missionaries don't understand what makes a good photo good or how to produce quality video. One of my many thoughts of late on the changing of our culture is that while we are all becoming publishers, we are often just pumping more junk out their that isn't really interesting. It's kinda like the "Get em saved!" charge without the follow-up to help them learn to commune with God personally. Have you guys thought about the follow-up process?

I'll be at the NYC Theme thing. I'd like to get a chance to talk to you Rob, about this then if you're available.

I think this idea has been brewing for a while, but it just exploded in the last 24 hours. We've had a kairos moment, and so with only some brief discussion this morning, Rob and I decided to launch the site. We intentionally launched quickly without a lot of detailed planning, because we didn't want the process to get bogged down in a lot of discussion and planning. We have a great pool of people who already know what needs to get done. Now it's time to jump in and do it. Will we have to sort out some procedural issues as we go? Yep. Should it stop us from getting started? Nope.

Our initial client is a missionary from Haiti. He is currently here in Michigan, and he asked if I knew anyone who knows how to build a website. His website needs are simple. His ministry is a registered 501c3 here in the US, so it's eligible for the free hosting from DreamHost.

The plan is to offer complete service, from an initial consultation to design, installation, training, hand-off, and follow-up support. Training needs to address both Drupal and local issues, like learning how to resize photos before attempting to upload them over dial-up connections to a photo gallery. Participation will not be limited to Drupal gurus.

The Free Mission Websites site will use the Project and Project Issues modules to track site tasks, support requests and bug reporting. Each client site will have its own project node containing some information about the ministry being helped. All participants - Geeks and God volunteers and the client ministries - will have user accounts on the site, so the clients can come back and post support requests after they're live. Making sure they know how to do this will be part of the hand-off process.

We've talked for a long time about install profiles. This almost eliminates the need for them. We will want a standard starting point. This may or may not ever get rolled into an actual install profile per se, but Josiah has the right idea here. We'll probably start with the first site as a model.

The same goes for themes. We'll want a couple of good starter themes handy, but we're really hoping that each site will get custom design work that looks good while being optimized for potentially slower connections and easy maintenance.

We're not talking about building sites with a ton of customization here. The info Rob put on the home page clearly defines what we want to do and who we want to do it for. The functionality needed can all be done with Drupal core and contributed modules.

If you think about it, the goal is summed up in Matt's tag line: "hopefully we'll give you something that can help you out in your church or ministry."

Micah

This sounds awesome!. I think I'll head over to the site and register....oh wait some anonymous person already signed me up ;)

Count me in!

Cool, I totally agree that some amount of "figure it out as you go" is appropriate here.

I think the idea of providing an area where they can come back and ask questions is great. Perhaps setting up a "Knowledge Base" content-type would give us a way to dump and refer to typical answers and even get answers to missionaries who care to explore this before asking questions.

Maybe that technical support and training role is where I'd fit best.

How much expertise do you need to help out?

Most of what I know about Drupal has been learnt from GeeksandGod, so anything too technical I cannot help out with. However I can do the basic (yet usually time consuming) set up tasks for a drupal site.

I also can use photoshop quite well - but aren't the most creative designer.

If you are wanting to have the projects start at the same spot. It might be worth while to look into either an SVN or a git repository, where whoever needs to start a site gets exactly the same starting modules. Then as modules are added to the "core" the repository would just need to be updated. The process isn't to difficult to start, and would give a good starting point.

I'm in the same boat as @sejtraav. I'd like to help with the grunt work.

I have some heavy commitments in the next couple of months (including building Drupal websites for a parachurch and a church) but am interested in being involved in the longer term. Nice idea. Your plan of breaking a planned site down into clearly defined chunks means even if a person only has a limited amount of time on a particular date, they can still contribute too, which sounds ideal to me.

For people who are saying they are not that technical, I think one really interesting role could be to make training screencasts on how to use different aspects of the site... That requires a good user-knowledge of Drupal but not to be a developer, and would be hugely useful. No doubt we'd want to burn these off to a disc to physically hand/send to the missionary who would otherwise be on (unbelievably expensive) dial-up, but a screencast would still by far be the best way to provide such training...

Seth,

I was thinking about SVN, too. We're also considering install profiles. Both may have pros and cons as far as making sure that each new site is reasonably up to date when launched that we'll have to consider, but could really accelerate site building and base configuration. Check the issues queue on the #fmw website for the discussion that has already started there.

Duncan,

Yep, we've also talked about the documentation aspect. I've never really found much good end-user documentation for Drupal. We've talked about the fact that if we create good docs for these missionaries, a lot of that can also be contributed back to drupal.org so our work for missions can also help light the way for others. (Yeah, I just came up with that. I really should get some sleep.) Also, good call on making those screencasts available on DVD.

Paul and Cody,

Glad to have you. The grunt work might not be where it normally is in the process, but there will be some. Documentation is a big deal. Answering user questions once sites are live will be crucial. Sites will need to be tested as they're ready for launch. There will be plenty to do.

Thanks so much to everyone who has signed up for an account on #fmw already. For a ministry that launched only three days ago, it's already been a wild ride. I'm totally excited about what God is doing in our midst.

Micah

Well, I have a LONG way to go before I can even think of calling myself a designer......or developer! I'm afraid I'd be more 'in the way' if I tried to do anything serious. But I guess I could be good at just going to a site to "test" its functionality. I'm getting more interested in Drupal so I'm looking forward to learning all I can.

Shane

Great idea that you have. Having been on a couple short term missions, during which I used my web skills I know this type of thing would be of great value. I'm not going to commit right now, but will keep it in mind.

Macfoto, get an account over their and then you can pop in and see what tasks need someone to take them on whenever you have some free time.