Open Social was inspired by the Drupal 7-based online community Greenpeace Greenwire, built by GoalGorilla. The Greenwire platform helped Greenpeace change the face of volunteering and empower thousands of volunteers to become more active and make the world a greener, more sustainable place. It increased volunteering activity by 600% in the Netherlands alone.

We anticipated that generalizing and modernizing a social network distribution could benefit many other organizations.

Open Social empowers people to effectively collaborate and organize. Replacing traditional intranets, it fuels efficiency and creativity. This supports organizations to innovate bottom-up instead of top-down. The Open Social distribution exists to lay a flexible groundwork to meet these goals. In order to do so the Open Social distribution must have:

World-class ease of use (on all devices)

Blazing fast (perceived) speed

Flexible customization and configuration (branding, integrations etc.)

Approach to the Design

Getting the interface right is a huge challenge. We want to make the distribution look really good out of the box and also have a theme that is customizable to an organization's brand.

To make Open Social's interface intuitively understandable for a wide range of users we use Google’s Material Design principles, and as a base theme we use Twitter’s Bootstrap. Open Social is built on Drupal 8, so we want to stay close to existing Drupal Core and Drupal modules usability patterns. Open Social users are probably used to certain conventions from existing social software they already use. A small example is the Group icon that Google uses for 'Groups', in Facebook this same icon means 'Friends'. So, when testing with real users (which we do each Sprint) the users were confused and we had to redesign a new Group icon.

Tools

Project Management

The most important project management tool that we use is Atlassian Jira (with Tempo and X-Ray add-ons). For internal team communication, we use Slack for messaging and Google HangOuts for video conferencing. Google Docs is our favorite when it comes to writing down content and extensive research.

Design

We use Axure for low fidelity prototyping. We use Illustrator for visual designs. The front-end is developed using a components strategy, which means building a living style guide based on the atomic design principle. We use Gulp for automated front-end development tasks, and Jade for rapid, high fidelity prototyping.

Development

Wow, tools and frameworks are really exploding these days. Some of our favorites for this project are: Docker, Composer, GitHub, Behat, Drush, Drupal Console, PHP Code Sniffer, PhpStorm, and MailCatcher.

Organizations

GoalGorilla

Open Social