"Just Because You Can Do Something, Doesn't Mean You Should"

Reni Barlow, Executive Director of Youth Science Canada, has some advice for everyone thinking about what to do with their website: "Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."

That was Barlow's advice for the kids in his computer class, back when he was an elementary school science teacher. In the late 1980s, he taught desktop publishing to grade 7/8 kids with brand new Apple Macintosh computers.

"When desktop publishing first came out, it absolutely empowered the masses to create total crap," he says. He likens that situation to all the free software and choices available in internet technology today.

"You can be tossed around by the latest cool thing you want to do." Barlow says his experience with the Youth Science Canada website tells him its better to stay focused, than do a lot of things not very well.

"People will say 'It doesn't do this, and it doesn't do that.' No, but it does do these things that we really wanted it to do."

After 14 years in the classroom, Barlow spent five as a principal. Then he moved on to Youth Science Canada. Though the transition wasn't as direct as you might imagine.

While still working in the school system, Barlow made the first Youth Science Canada website himself. "This organization that was supposedly on the cutting edge of science and technology, didn't have a website. So I made them a very basic one."

Later, when the organization was going through a difficult period, Barlow was approached about being the Executive Director.

"The thing was run virtually by volunteers. There was no money, no staff. I thought, well, okay, that's a pretty interesting challenge."

For six years, Youth Science Canada operated out of Barlow's house. The first staff person they hired came to work each day in his basement.

In 2008 they had pulled things together enough to get an office. Barlow says the turnaround was as much about changing people's minds as about sorting out the staffing and funding situation. "One major beef people had with the National Organization was that it never delivered anything it promised."

The website they had by then was part of the problem, despite being rebuilt since the original one Barlow created. "It's really embarrassing when someone is looking for something on your website, and you say, 'No, it's there, I'll show you,' and then you can't find it. 'I'm sure it's in here somewhere!'"

In 2009, Barlow was at the annual Science and Technology Awareness Network conference in Ottawa, where Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions gave a talk about managing IT in a not-for-profit context.

Barlow was interested in the flexible approach to projects that Freeform advocates.

In their previous website projects, Barlow says the approach to development was "based on the people knowing all the details up front. But that's impossible."

The developers filled in the gaps in those details as they built the site. As a result, when the site was completed, Barlow's reaction was "That's not what we wanted even though that's what we said we wanted." And changes required custom, hand-coded solutions.

So, in 2010, Youth Science Canada and Freeform Solutions embarked on a long term project to completely revise the Youth Science Canada website infrastructure. We employed Agile project management techniques to help us respond to changes in priorities and requirements as the project unfolded, so no one had to know all the details up front.

The results have been a success, even recently earning an award from MILSET, an international organization that promotes youth science activities.

Barlow says that one important thing the new website does "is make us look bigger than we are. People assume we have more staff and resources than we actually do. That raises our profile, and part of that gives us a bigger impact."

The new website has also had a big effect on how Youth Science Canada gets its message out. On the old website, the only thing they could change, without doing HTML coding themselves, was the news on the front page, and all news items had to have a photo attached.

Barlow really likes the variety of different content types they have to work with now. "It could be a blog post, a news thing, an event, it could be a feature story. Before, it was like, 'I can't find a photo, I can't post a story.'"

Barlow says two things did surprise him a little as the work unfolded. "The robustness of the Agile process, but also Drupal. The nicest surprise is that pretty much whatever we ask for, there's something out there to do it."

The Drupal content management platform has hundreds of modules that extend its capabilities and so far nearly all of Youth Science Canada's needs have been met by one module or the other. That has drastically reduced the need for custom programming in their project.

What's next for this evolving website? "We're working on integrating Twitter/RSS into the news postings, so they will be like mini stories. Our feed will be the one you want to subscribe to, to get it all."