Amie McCarron for the Alcoholics Anonymous New Zealand websites; the public facing site, service/members site and annual convention website.

AA is fully self-supported, funded only by member contributions and therefore the budget for this project was extremely limiting. However by proposing use of free and open source software along with a large amount of pro-bono effort their requirements were able to be met within budget. The project took literally hundreds of hours over a period of 9 months. Over 90%* of the work was completed by myself from the proposal, project management, design, development, communications with client, liaison with support teams for the OS products, and training the administrator how to manage the sites and components. Due to the large amount of data to be managed and shared, this was a difficult project. Discovery of the JMS Multisites was integral to properly integrating all three websites and making it easy for the non-technical administrators to manage the site on a daily basis. Working closely with the JMS developers, the method for implementing this solution for this project was able to be worked out. Commitment to delivering each requirement and providing A.A. the best website possible using the selected solutions resulted in the following benefits to the customer and their audiences: • A new functional and well structured website enhancing the image of A.A. in New Zealand making it more inviting to people of all ages who might think they have a drinking problem. • Enabling more targeted information to be shared with both the public and members using Joomla! user and content based permissions. • Making information for those seeking help for either themselves or others more freely available and easy to find. Allowing people to register on members site and thus gain even more information about A.A. and support services using the free OS Community Builder extenstion. • Enabling the service structure and committees of AA to operate and share information, both content and the uploading of documents using a free OS document management component and OS form components. • Greater efficiencies in handling the sales/payment process of selling A.A. literature via the online store using a free OS online store component. • Making it easier for members to donate. • An online registration and payment process for the annual convention making it easier for attendees to sign up and organisers to manage the process using OS DTRegister. • Providing an easy and fast way to locate a meeting anywhere in New Zealand using free OS event management component. Previously this was managed manually and often contained inaccurate and out-of-date details due to Meeting Co-ordinators being required to send their changes through to another person to update. Now this is managed online and Meeting Co-ordinators are able to update their own meeting details once an administrator assigns them editor privileges. Without this open source solution, there is no doubt A.A. would not of been able to provide the public and members such a valuable resource. *I did employ temporary help for some data entry, content setup and a small amount of development on the meeting finder.