Dries Buytaert

The World Bank has many websites and a varied online presence and some are running Drupal. Their climate change site, http://beta.worldbank.org, which launched a few months ago uses Drupal. The site serves as a beta for the new content strategy the Bank would like for the future: an integrated model of publishing around shared topics, countries, and products to achieve greater audience reach and satisfaction. This site takes a single topic: "climate change", and aggregates World Bank content from a variety of sources in an automated fashion.

The World Bank's mission is to reduce global poverty and improve living standards. It serves as a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. Global climate change is a major priority for The World Bank as developing countries will be particularly vulnerable to adverse conditions caused by it.

The World Bank has reams of information regarding climate change but it was separated by organizational groups and internal systems and it was nearly impossible for a visitor to find and combine these different sources. To counter this problem, The World Bank engaged Phase2 Technology to launch a pilot site that demonstrates the potential success of a topic-based site with large amounts of data. In addition to great tools for data integration and visualization, the site has support for low end mobile devices and multimedia integration.

It's very satisfying to know that Drupal is powering such an important site which is poised to help better the plight of developing countries. Experts anticipate climate change will hit the third world the hardest. This site is one of the more prominent Drupal sites The World Bank currently has, but it is a great example of how to effectively showcase data on important issues. I hope they will consider using Drupal for future projects.