The Clean Economy Network (CEN) is the national advocacy association for the cleantech and green business community. The Network emerged from the 2008 presidential election with strong ties to the CleanTech and Green Business for Obama organizations. OpenSourcery was very excited to work with an organization whose guiding principle is that "economic growth, quality jobs, international competitiveness, environmental sustainability, and energy independence are not mutually exclusive, but rather are all vital elements of a healthy, dynamic economy."

Background

The Network is a broad, nonpartisan collection of professionals, entrepreneurs, investors, workers joined by like-minded professionals and thinkers from across the economy and across the political spectrum. We work at the intersection of politics, policy and business to develop and advocate for policies and programs which meet our Guiding Principles, catalyze clean development and create green jobs.

Having emerged from the 2008 presidential election with a growing number of supporters, the Network needed a Web application that could communicate with existing supporters, deliver a strong message, and allow site administrators to easily manage content.

Key features

• Custom JavaScript slideshow on home page. No Flash required!
• YouTube video upload module to display nationally distributed video campaign
• Simple membership signup with "required" and "volunteer" fields
• Advanced "Executive" membership option that allows individuals to purchase membership onsite
• Targeted email campaigns

Challenges

The development of the Clean Economy Network's Drupal + CiviCRM Web application presented a few technical challenges. The first challenge was to provide a platform whereby the Network could quickly welcome the 7,000 existing members of CleanTech and Green Business for Obama. The Network needed a donor management system that could capture their information in a database they could use to intelligently organize members around future actions. Since one of the Network's primary goals is to "to advance policies that will promote a rapid transition to a cleaner economy," the ability to inform and promote activities among its member base is paramount.

The CEN site had to be a platform that made communicating organizational information easy. While their mission remains the same from week to week, the content itself is always changing. Multiple staff and volunteer users need the ability to manage content, whether it be to edit page content, write a newsletter, or upload a new video.

Process and Outcomes

The Clean Economy Network project is another example of OpenSourcery's Agile development process. Our project managers worked with the CEN's stakeholders to prioritize needs, iterate, and assess the project at every milestone. When pressing needs arose, as they do with time-sensitive projects, OpenSourcery was able to shift resources and address emerging challenges.

We also worked with their designers to customize a Drupal theme to fit their branding and messaging. OpenSourcery's user experience team coordinated with the CEN's themer to enhance the existing theme to increase its functionality and attractiveness. The result is an easy-to-navigate Web application that allows users to easily find the content they're looking for.

The CEN now manages the site and has seen their membership grow significantly. OpenSourcery looks forward to partnering with the Clean Economy Network as it continues to grow and increase its offerings.

The Linux Foundation serves a worldwide community of developers and users. Their stated mission is to Promote, Protect, and Standardize the Linux ecosystem by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms. More than ever, LinuxFoundation.org helps further that mission with web-based tools and vital user-generated content.

Story

The Linux Foundation and OpenSourcery began working together in the summer of 2008, with the goal of transforming the Linux Foundation's corporate site to reflect the vibrant community it supports. Their existing site was informative and, in some ways, well loved. Long-time users knew how to access the information they needed and were familiar with the site's architecture. But in the final analysis their site architecture was not tenable. The Foundation had accumulated a number of web properties, including the Linux OpenPrinting site and a number of Programs sub-domains, which had been cobbled together to serve immediate needs. Moving forward, the combined properties needed to coalesce under a single, forward-thinking architecture. Enter OpenSourcery.

Developing a new Linux Foundation site presented several challenges, which can largely be grouped into two buckets: 1) unifying deep and diverse content into a well-architected site and 2) developing a clean interface that doesn't overwhelm visitors with options.

Solving the primary challenge required open communication between OpenSourcery and the Linux Foundation. We had to ask the right questions, consider the variety of use cases, and design the site accordingly. The discovery process is well suited to our Agile development process, which you can read about in more detail below.

Perhaps the most creative solutions employed during the development have to do with the second challenge: Linux Foundation's user interface. We realized that visitors could easily get overwhelmed by an overabundance of tabs and conflicting images. On the other hand, we wanted to avoid Flash and non-accessible JavaScript so the site could remain accessible and easily indexed by search engines. Jonathan Hedstrom solved both of these problems with a combination of contributed and custom modules, details of which can be found below.

The result is an attractive site that makes it easy for each user to quickly access what she needs, without sacrificing the Linux Foundation's goals of completeness and accessibility. OpenSourcery is proud to have collaborated with such a talented team, and we look forward to supporting the Linux Foundation's mission in the future.

Development Process

OpenSourcery had assembled a Linux Foundation team during the development of a previous project: the Linux Foundation Video Site. From the start of their corporate site refactor, we were familiar with the Linux Foundation's project team and goals.

We employed our Agile development process from the project's beginning. We maintained close contact throughout, iterated in short bursts, and frequently pushed code so the Linux Foundation would know where their project stood at all times. Our process also allowed them to guide development by prioritizing tasks, which kept the complex project on budget and on time.

Technical Details

• jQuery front page slideshow (no Flash!) via ddblock and custom Views templates (see second image, left)
• Pure jQuery/css to take five panel panes and create the front page tab section (see third image, left)
• Organic Groups for the Linux Developer Network
• Nodequeue, Panels and extensive Views work throughout
• RSS content aggregation from other Linux Foundation web properties via the feedapi module
• Extensive custom theme development (as a subtheme of the Zen theme)
• Robust content publication workflow via the Workflow, Workspace, Actions and Triggers modules
• Ubercart for online membership registration
• LDAP integration allowing user accounts to traverse across all of Linux Foundation's web properties