In 2009, the New Relationship Trust, the First Nations Technology Council, and Idéeclic worked together to develop a Drupal based collaborative website that allows BC First Nations’ governments, organizations and communities to come together and share ideas on a variety of topics. The site was conceived as a web-based tool used to improve and promote collaboration between First Nations communities, governments and organizations.

The objectives of the site are: to support these groups in community development, governance and analysis; to house and share best practices documents, templates, policies and procedures, resources, links and initiatives that support First Nations capacity building; to support ‘Communities of Practice’ where First Nations technicians, managers and leaders can contribute and share their ideas and information, as well as discuss issues; and to create world-wide access to markets and a pathway to BC First Nations economic development opportunities and businesses.

Link: http://fnbc.info/

The site features a suite of powerful tools:

• "Community of Practice" Secure Area: A Community of Practice is defined as a group of professionals working in the same field, or coming together to discuss a common issue. This section allows members of a Community of Practice to share information and collaborate on documents, discuss important issues (using s forum), and share events and links with each other (calendars, uploading tools, etc,). These communities are for members only, to encourage sharing of unfinished work or communication within the community on issues they do not necessarily wish the public to see. They also have access to an RSS feeds and image galleries.
• Tools and Resources Section: This section allows site administrators to upload interesting documents, links, images, videos and audio elements that can be shared with the entire community. Site users can download these documents and use them to help “build the plans and procedures to support strong governance and community or capacity development”. Documents are tagged with topics, and displayed in categories for easy reference. Users can also submit documents to the administrators for approval and upload.
• Mini-site generator: A custom feature of this site is the ability to generate mini-sites for organizations that do not have a website of their own or the capacity to build and host one. These mini-sites use the same tools configured for the main site, including the events calendar, site search, tools and resources capacity, photo galleries, forums (managed by the mini-site admin) and statistics module. Custom designs can be integrated for each mini-site, and provide a web presence.
• News page: Allows the site administrators to post news articles of importance to the First Nations in BC, with the selected article synopsis appearing on the front page of the site dynamically.
• Job Board: The job board is a space where administrators can post job opportunities for First Nations in a single place, to provide easy access to their opportunities. Jobs postings are key-word searchable and can be filtered by title, city, posting date or closing date.
• Full site search: Boolean keyword search of the entire siteStatistics Module: Using Drupal’s statistics module, stats are kept for the site administrators to assess how the site is being used and keep track of traffic. The number of visits to each page is logged, along with referrers and where visitors are being referred from, login attempts and user connections.• Events Calendar: The site administrators can add events, enable a sign-up feature and payment options. Users can also download the calendar.
• Advertising Space: Space for Aboriginal businesses to advertise has been provided on the site footer, and is controlled by the site administrators. Businesses and organizations can contact the administrator for inclusion on the site.

Additional features include:

• Photo galleries
• RSS subscription
• Social Media Sharing Options
• “Follow Us” options (where users can access the Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts maintained by the portal).