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By United Nations, Open Social on
GlobalDevHub is the first platform we developed for the United Nations Development Programme. It replaces a legacy platform and facilitates e-Discussions on key issues surrounding sustainable development, democratic governance, peace-building, and climate and disaster resilience. This community hosts over 54.000 members and had over 300 comments in the first month.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The UNDP chose Open Social because the existing features included many of the functionalities they were looking for, which meant that more energy could be put into customizing the platform according to the UNDP’s wishes.
Discussions on GlobalDevHub dig deep, so purely text-based comments just wouldn’t do. To ensure that users could post rich comments, we customized the discussion functionality on this platform with rich editors and custom, time-based publishing workflows.
The ability to make one key feature the focal point for GlobalDevHub while simultaneously not losing sight of other important features demonstrates how flexible Open Social truly is. Moreover, this project showed the speed at which we can deliver big and complex projects. It took less than 3 months to release GlobalDevHub to the general public.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The UNDP was looking for a platform that brings together members from their different legacy platforms and facilitates timed e-Discussions. These discussions provide the UNDP with ideas, suggestions, and recommendations for building localized and actionable strategies to eradicate poverty across the globe.
As of November 2017, GlobalDevHub has 54.000 members and over 3.000 comments. In May 2017 the project was updated to allow for multiple e-Discussions to be run simultaneously by the UN, making the platform even more powerful. You can see a most recent update of members and comments and join in the discussion on the GlobalDevHub platform itself.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Additional modules used for this project were:
- Social Login, which was developed during the project and contributed back to the Open Social distribution and the Drupal community;
- Migration tools, which were used to migrate users and their profiles from a legacy Drupal platform;
- Swift Mailer, to send out invitation emails in batches;
- Mollom, to automatically filter user generated content for spam and profanity.
Community contributions:
A number of modules were developed by the Open Social team in close cooperation with GoalGorilla:
- Social Login modules to sign-up and login through Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn
- The Google Translate module (forked from GTranslate module)
- A new module to add files to comments
Organizations involved:
Project team:
Moritz Arendt (Scrum Master)
Taco Potze (Open Social Product Owner)
The project is coordinated and organized by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Sectors:
Community
Government
Non-profit
Social Networking
