Earlier this month one of my favorate environmental groups, Greenpeace, announced that they are starting their own social software platform. I really wish Greenpeace all the best with their venture to role out their own CMS. I am sure they are going to do an awesome job and create a really powerful project. This past weekend I got around to commenting on their blog and wanted to repost some of my thoughts here.

Other organizations in a similar situation to Greenpeace should take a second thought before reinventing functionality that already exists and, and more importantly, doing so without the support system of a large developers community. My concerns are especially targeted at multinational NGOs that are looking for social software at home but are also trying to pass on that investment to their regional office. If any regional office or regional project is ever going to embrace a technology, it needs to be locally sustainable, not only so the organization will use it but also so the State side organization is able to plant a seed and assist, and then pull back and give them the power to run it.

Since Greenpeace often operates on a decentralized country-by-country basis and campaigns by camping level, it is sad that work is not being invested in a stable, international application like Drupal or Plone. Of course I am bias towards Drupal, but mainly because it works so well in exactly this situations.  Drupal has a large international user group and support system, both in the user-to-user sense and in the for-profit level, with shops all around the world.

For example, if the Greenpeace office in Argentina sees value in sms campaigns, they could invest in expanding or testing civiCRM’s sms functionality, which is really picking up speed, thanks to Ben from Mobile Voter and Lobo. Their Argentine office could benefit from this in just a couple of months and improve it so the Chilean office can influence the new political officials after the election this past Sunday (Dec 11). This is not so much of a hypothetical. Greenpeace Argentina just won a huge victory, helping to pass the Zero Waste policy in Buenos Aries via an sms campaign (See Mobile sms campaign helps Greenpeace win Zero Waste (Basura Cero) policy in Argentina for more information on that campaign).

I think this is a good example of how to look at Drupal and other large and powerful open source CMSs- not so much as a solution but as a developers platform that has a killer foundation (like those 119 apps that Drum and Zack mentioned on the Custard Melt blog, which already match to some extent Greenpeace initial specs) to build out upon and customize for their cause. Taking this approach would give Greenpeace time to target climate-specific and activists tools they will need… and sleep comfortably at night knowing that there are always a couple of developers up making sure their version of Drupal will stay secure and grow. We chose OSS for all the obvious reason. We chose Drupal/CivicSpace because of the developer base and commitment. Three years later our clients and staff are Drupalheads.

Will this project fly?  If anyone can make it I am sure Greenpeace can do it and do it well.  Just some thoughts for other organizations in a similar boat.