Greenpeace Greenwire Global Community

Work on Greenpeace Greenwire began in 2013 and focused on four core areas: usability, social aspects, flexibility and security.

1. Usability

Greenpeace Greenwire is designed for users with little prior knowledge of online communities. Volunteers should understand at a glance what the network offers, and it should be intuitive to use. User-centered design principles were applied:

1. The design is based upon an explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments.
2. Users are involved in the design process and evaluations.
3. The process is iterative: move through cycles of creating, evaluating and adjusting.

A user centered design approach is an extensive process. For people with little experience in design, it can be quite overwhelming. That’s why 18 staff members from 7 different countries attended a four-day usability workshop. During the workshop, the staff members learned about the user-centered design process, while our (interaction) designers and development team learned more about Greenpeace Greenwire’s users, volunteers and community managers.

The design workshop and outcomes included survey results, card sorting techniques, personas and usability tests with rapid prototypes. We also gathered feedback on graphic design, especially on the international use of icons and colors for each content-type based on the tasks a user wants to perform on the platform.

Our interaction designer and ICT professionals spent time at Greenpeace International in order to gather input based on real experience and involve the end users in the process. This helped us to define our main user stories and scenarios. A living style guide was created to ensure that the design stayed consistent and that all team members are continuously up to date on changes.

At the time of writing, responsive design is in development. See and play around with the responsive prototype.

2. Social features

To build a strong group of committed users, tools to support self-organisation and self-management on Greenpeace Greenwire allow volunteers to use and share their impressive skill sets.

Facebook-like shoutbox

A logged-in user can use a shoutbox to update their profile and send updates to specific groups or to everyone on Greenpeace Greenwire. Users can also post links. Like Facebook, an image from the linked-to page will appear in the shoutbox and can be selected as a teaser. Users can also upload and add pictures, reply to other people’s shouts, and edit and delete their own shouts.

Create and administer events

Every user can create events. If a user takes on the role of an event organiser, an operations menu lets organizers invite or remove users from an event individually or in bulk, as well as add other administrators, send group emails, and download and export a list of users enrolled in an event.

Friendships and private messaging

The Friends tab on the member page lets users add friends, as well as search for friends by name, location, education, profession and skills. Once a member is found, a user can send them a friend request by clicking on their name and going to their profile.

User role management

The architecture of user roles in Greenpeace Greenwire is technically interesting, as it allows users to have different roles in different domains and national and regional offices. To accomplish this, a custom module that can differentiate roles across multiple domains was developed.

The custom Domain Roles module was created because a similar one on Drupal.org (also called Domain roles) did not do what was needed. Our module allows users to have different roles across multiple domains. For example, one user can be a content manager on one domain, but a normal user on another. This obviously allows for better access control. It also integrates with Drupal user roles, so if you want to give a single user the role of administrator on all domains, you can still do that. The module also defines actions for all the roles that are available, so you can use them for bulk operations. This module has not been contributed to Drupal yet: it's a bit too rough around the edges right now. In the future, it will either be integrated with the existing module or published as a contribution module.

Other features

Other undiscussed features are: profiles, news, blog, documents, photos, ideas, videos, materials, e-mails, notifications, newsletters, social sign-up, Solr search, analytics, maps, comments, social sharing, comments, forms, translations, private notes, testimonials, data migration, widgets and many more.

3. Flexibility and scalability

The combination of multiple domains, multiple languages and organic groups makes Greenpeace Greenwire a unique platform that is both flexible and scalable.

Multiple Domains

The various Greenpeace national and regional offices require their own autonomous environment, but users are centrally administered and can move between environments. Because of this, domains have been incorporated in the Greenpeace Greenwire project.

Multiple Languages

Within each domain, users can set their primary language, and secondary language(s) in their profile settings, so there is a language fallback option. This function is unique to the Greenpeace Greenwire platform, as normally Drupal only allows for one language. This is essential for Greenpeace’s volunteer network as people regularly work together across language barriers, and is especially important in countries such as Belgium or Luxembourg where bilingual and trilingual communities cooperate.

Organic Groups

Groups are spaces for members who have things in common. Users can search and join a group that is located in their community and or based on shared skills. Users may also create their own groups. An anonymous user can browse the groups’ public pages.

Integrations

Each national or regional office uses a different Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to communicate with their volunteers and digital subscribers. Json APIs built into Greenpeace Greenwire are used to integrate and create supporter awareness in a broader ecosystem of applications used by the many offices.

4. Privacy and Security

The goal is to provide a safe online environment with internationally recognised standards. The “s” in https://greenwire.greenpeace.org indicates the site is operating on a secure connection. Also, after some minutes of inactivity, users will automatically be logged out to limit the risk of unauthorized access to personal information.

Users can change their privacy settings to restrict access to personal data to other users on the platform. They may hide their last name, hide their avatar from public pages and hide their phone numbers from event organizers.

5. Project Approach

Many stakeholders are involved in high-impact and large-scale projects like Greenpeace Greenwire. All these people have knowledge, ideas and wishes for the project. In order to create a successful solution, a process-driven design phase before going into site development is managed by a team of senior users and design specialists. This process prevents thrashing (excessive project overheads or unproductive work), which tends to arise when projects start without a fully thought-out process. During the design phase, methods and techniques like personas, prototyping, agile graphic design and conceptual alpha testing are applied.

Test management

Because of the ever changing needs and priorities of the users, and to ensure flexibility, Greenpeace Greenwire uses Agile or Scrum development framework. With thousands of user stories, all kinds of scenarios and many ‘edge cases’, it is impossible to test all features manually before going live after a new development sprint. To ensure the quality of the product, Continuous integration (CI) and Quality Assurance (QA) tools and standardized software testing processes are used for QA and User Acceptance Testing. The CI server will automatically run all the automated tests and sends an email if new code breaks existing functionality to the developers.

Behat is a tool that enables behavior driven development (BDD). With BDD, you write human-readable stories that describe the behavior of your application. Next, these stories are auto-tested against the application. Simpletest is used for the unit tests. In addition each feature must have a manual test. These manual tests are created in the issue and project tracking tool using a testing management extension. This enables developers, reviewers and the clients to test each functionality on the site step-by-step.

The development team follow the GIT Branching model from Nvie: working with Git-flow makes it easier to follow this model. The model is a set of procedures that every team member has to follow in order to come to a managed software development process. These procedures also ensure every code is tested by the developer and at least one reviewer before the code is pushed to the acceptance environment.

The tools used are based around the Atlassian suite, including Jira.

6. Rollout

The rollout of Greenpeace Greenwire is taking place in phases. In 2013, The Netherlands, the USA and Russia launched. This year, India, France, Belgium, Thailand, Nordic (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden) and UK have launched (some are still in ‘beta’ phase, behind a password to restrict access while the volunteer community coordinators prepare to engage). Brazil and Indonesia will be launched by December, and in 2015 and 2016, the remaining Greenpeace countries will follow.

One of Greenpeace Greenwire’s design principles - determined by Greenpeace volunteer-coordination staff - is that “Greenpeace Greenwire is a community, not a crowd”. This community-orientation marks a key strategic difference between Greenpeace Greenwire and the organisation’s impressive email-based campaigning and petition tools. Because of this, they have chosen natural, organic growth without too much marketing. By learning from the feedback of hundreds of thousands of visitors and the almost 10,000 people currently using platform, the platform will continue to evolve to meet the needs of its users.

Here’s what Brian Fitzgerald, Greenpeace International Head of Digital Mobilisation, had to say about Greenpeace Greenwire:

Greenpeace Greenwire is increasing Greenpeace's reach and amplifying the power of our volunteers every day. By enabling people to self-organise and providing them the tools to coordinate, learn from each other, and share their ideas and stories, it provides a place to create remarkable campaigns and content, allowing us to have impact far beyond the limits of our staff numbers and office locations. It uses bits in the ether to put boots on the ground. It's a key element of a future in which the lines between online and offline activism are further blurred, and more people can find more meaningful ways to join up their efforts to build a green and peaceful future.