Sector - an award winner at the New Zealand Open Source Awards 2018

Sparks Interactive are delighted to accept the Open Source Use in Business award for Sector and the Sector.nz open source platform.

There was a strong group of finalists at the New Zealand Open Source Awards, so Sparks are humbled to be counted amongst them, and to have been selected as the winner. Sparks are proud of their work on Sector as a local, open source distribution of Drupal, and look forward to continuing their contribution to the open source community.

Sparks Interactive and Sector

Sparks published Sector out in the open as a way of contributing to the New Zealand open source community. It is designed to be a sustainable, New Zealand-specific Drupal distribution, which can be used to build and maintain Drupal sites without the need to code.

Long-term commitment to Sector and open source

Sector and Sector.nz are milestones in a long term strategy. In 2015, Dave Sparks made a commitment to bring the web development and consulting work done by Sparks Interactive into the open source community, and change the way the company works. 

Looking at ways to contribute to the open source community, Sparks decided to publish their in-house Drupal base install profile as a Drupal distribution on Drupal.org. 

Sector D7 was published in 2016, followed in 2018 by Sector D8 - a new Sector version based on Drupal in version 8 - underlining Sparks’ long term commitment to Sector and the Drupal community. In 2018, Sparks also started to publish their internal documentation and resources on Sector.nz, the Sector online platform. 

A collaborative effort

Included in the nomination and award is the use of Sector for the relaunched Forest & Bird website.

Successful open source projects rely on businesses and users to participate in the design process. Collaborating with Forest & Bird allowed the Sector project to advance and grow as a whole - which benefits not only Forest & Bird, but any organisations using Sector in the future.

The project - Forest & Bird

Forest & Bird is New Zealand’s leading independent conservation organisation. Their new website is built on Sector, which helped make it straightforward to create a user experience that engages with a wide audience base. The pre-configured nature of Sector means it was quick to kick off the project, and fill the site with quality content.

Forest & Bird's website allows them to promote their current campaigns and projects, as well as raise funds via donations. The site is also easy to use for both visitors and editorial staff. Sector’s customisable user roles allow for collaboration within Forest & Bird - so users from each of their 50 branches are able to contribute and manage content on the site.

Read more about the Forest & Bird project in our case studies.

For other examples of projects that use Sector, see the Sector Showcase.

If you'd like to know more, get in touch with Sparks Interactive.