Community Tools making it easier for communities to connect

It's been a great opportunity whilst being out here in Estonia to learn more about local projects that are making the most of the internet. One of these projects was launched by the Uue Maailma Selts community group, an area of Tallinn.

In the early days of the community group a simple website was enough to contain all of the information they wanted to share but as the sense of community grew and their joint activites increased - such as promoting events, sharing books and DVDs, advertising a bike repair service, info about local service providers etc - they needed something that would suit them better.

After many iterations of the http://www.uusmaailm.ee/ website they decided to create something that exactly met their needs, built on Drupal and with funding from the Open Estonia Foundation, Enterprise Estonia and the National Foundation of Civil Society.

And so Community Tools http://communitytools.info/ was born and they're planning to release it into the wild very soon for other communities of people (geographic or not) to use. It seems to me to be different to the other hyperlocal sites we see in the UK in that it's all in one place, it's like having a local blog, events listing, Google maps mashup and Fix My Street all in one site, for everyone to add to.

This project is absolutely amazing, the passion of the people in the community is amazing and I can't wait to see how other people start to use it on its release.

The project was chosen to represent Estonia at the recent Shanghai Expo and they had this very snazzy video made: