For those of you that don’t know us; we’re the same team that created the award-winning — continue reading
For those of you that don’t know us; we’re the same team that created the award-winning Drupal-based community: ‘Greenpeace Greenwire’. This community is used worldwide, supporting over seventy thousand volunteers globally.
Open Social helps NGOs and semi-governmental organizations develop their communities and volunteer networks, and boost efforts from their most active participants. We aim to create a maximum impact on grassroots activities, from online to offline and back. Discover how we are reinventing the intranet, helping increase the impact of NGOs, and how you can both profit from and participate in our project below!
There are seventeen people working in the core team of Open Social with more people contributing every day. We’re funded by GoalGorilla, a leading Drupal agency from The Netherlands, and by our friends and investors, who supported us through our funding round in 2015.
Okay Cool, but What Do You Do?
The Open Social distribution is the successor of Drupal Commons, taking full advantage of the new possibilities offered by Drupal 8. Our primary customer base consists of NGOs and semi-governmental organizations. We have the most experience in this area and have seen that these organizations benefit from adopting the open adoption mindset. However, Open Social is also evolving into a perfect open source tool to replace existing, proprietary intranets.
We decided to become a Drupal Signature Partner because we want to give back to the Drupal community for giving us so many opportunities. We’ve seen the power of Drupal distributions and truly believe open adoption will drive the next wave of software. It ensures collaboration and innovation routes that are almost impossible to achieve in a closed environment. This results in better products for both our customers and their users. In short: we know the strength of the community and want to give back and help accelerate Drupal’s growth.
The Story so Far…
Drupal.org and Packagist report over 40.000 downloads and 500+ active installs since we went live with our beta distribution in September 2016. This makes us the second most installed Drupal 8 distribution to date. We already have our first clients running real live Open Social communities! We’re working closely together with the United Nations and have launched the Youth4Peace community for the United Nations Development Program. Even more exciting; other Drupal agencies have started using Open Social, including BrightLemon from the UK, Triquanta from The Netherlands, and Genero from Japan.
Where Are We Headed?
We release new code every 2 / 3 weeks. We’ve already completed many ‘basic’ community features such as groups, notifications, personalized activity streams, likes, follows and much more. This is only the beginning, of course. Our release candidate is almost done, and version 1.0 was released in June 2017. Alongside our stable distribution release, we launched our fully maintained software-as-a-service version which includes hosting, updates, and support.
We have planned the release of other exciting features like content flagging and analytics for community managers. This will really help their communities thrive. You can check out our roadmap at drupal.org. We’re also working on some very innovative things such as progressive web application functionalities which will enable Open Social to push notifications to your mobile devices. You will be able to see us demo these capabilities at our DrupalCon Baltimore session.
And finally for the business minded people among you; we have an agency partnership program launching soon and we are looking into rewarding developers for their contributions. We will be talking more about this in our April webcast so stay tuned!
Why Should You Get Involved?
- You can use Open Social for your own projects and clients.
- You give back to the open-source community.
- As a Drupal freelancer or professional you improve your Drupal.org standing.
We welcome code contributions, issue reports, and translations. Learn how you can contribute to our Documentation Guide or get sign up for our partnership program for agencies. Please contact info@getopensocial.com if you have any questions!
