By natalie_wright on

The following blog was written by Drupal Association Signature Supporting Partner, Open Social.

Open Social activates communities from the bottom-up

For those of you that don’t know us; we are the same team that created the award winning Drupal based community: 'Greenpeace Greenwire' which is now being used worldwide, supporting over seventy thousand volunteers globally. With Open Social we help NGOs and semi-governmental organizations organize their communities and volunteer networks, and boost efforts from their most active participants. We aim to create a maximum impact for grassroots activities, from online to offline and back. 

Discover how we are reinventing the intranet, help 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 and 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.


(Part of) Open Social and GoalGorilla teams, friends and investors at our office in The Netherlands.
 

Okay cool, but what do you do?

The Open Social distribution is the successor of Drupal Commons, taking full advantage of the new possibilities of Drupal 8. We decided to focus on NGOs and semi-governmental organizations as our primary customer base. We have the most experience in this area and have seen that these type of organizations are very perceptive the open adoption mindset. But Open Social is also evolving into a perfect open source tool to replace existing, proprietary intranets.


Open Social Drupal Association Signature Partner
 

We decided to become Drupal Signature Partner because we want to give back to the Drupal community because it has given 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 and stakeholders. In short: we know the strength of the community and want to give back and help accelerate Drupal’s innovation.


Source the Acquirer, taken from an article by Jake Flomenberg, Partner at Accel. Read his article on medium: The Rise of OPEN Innovation: The 3P’s for Building a Durable Open Software Company.
 

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 together closely with the United Nations and have launched the Youth4Peace community for their United Nations Development Program with more UN communities on the way. 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? Expect release 1.0 in June, SaaS and more...

We release new code every 2 to 3 weeks. Currently we’ve completed many ‘basic’ community features such as groups, notifications, personalized activity streams, likes, follows and much much more. This is of course only the beginning. Our release candidate is almost done, we’re aiming to release 1.0 by at the end of June. Alongside our stable distribution release, we will launch our fully maintained software-as-a-service version which includes hosting, updates and support.

Other exciting features we have planned for 2017 are things like content flagging and analytics for community managers. This will really help them make their communities thrive. You can check out our roadmap on 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? :)

  1. You can use Open Social for your own projects and clients
  2. You give back to the open-source community
  3. 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 in our Wiki. Please contact info@getopensocial.com if you have any questions.