Volunteer Passport: Launch of ePortfolio system
Over the last couple of months, in my spare time, I’ve been volunteering doing some programming work for the BTCV (British Trust for Conservation Volunteers) on their Volunteer Involvement Team to develop a “Volunteer Passport”. I’ve been volunteering with BTCV for a number of years, but always on their conservation work projects, so doing programming for them was a little more like my normal day job 
What they needed from the Volunteer Passport system was somewhere their key volunteers could record their learning experiences/objectives, skills, courses etc… so essentially an ePortfolio system. So rather than building something from scratch, I’ve adapted ELGG to add in the extra functionality required for the Volunteer Passport – this mainly involved updating the edit profile section to allow for skills and courses entry.
The system is now live on the BTCV servers at: http://passport.btcv.org.uk and we’re presenting it at the BTCV volunteers conference this weekend. It’s still not fully complete, there is plenty more functionality that we’d like to add, as well as getting it more closely integrated with existing BTCV IT systems, but it is a working system, so feel free to sign up and have a play 
We’ve created a forum for feedback, so if you have comments, queries or suggestions please post them there.
For those interested I’ve used Google Code as the source code repository for the work I’ve done (see: http://code.google.com/p/volunteer-passport/). I know there are other (voluntary) organisations who are very interested in what we’re doing, with a view to creating their own, so all the code I’ve written is open source and freely available to anyone who wants to use it
Looks very neat… ELGG has some cool tools… worth a KMi Planet story!!!
Alex – I like what you have done – I am using elgg for a variety of audiences and tasks right now – from teacher’s community, to research community to course delivery and eportfolio. I too wanted to make changes to the profile fields and welcome your contribution. Our local government is also interetsed in e-democracy and my next attempt will be to entice them into an elgg site as a comunity for dialog with constituents.
[...] 16 Jul 2008 Today I met attended a workshop with BTCV to try to decide on the future of the Volunteer Passport that I was involved with a few months ago (especially as I’m not going to be here to maintain [...]