Sometime in August 2004, several small gatherings were held at Greenpeace to discuss a soon-to-be-launched anti-corporate campaign. In those meetings the campaign objectives, the strategy for achieving them and the tactics to be employed were all detailed. Drupal and CivicSpace were both discussed early on. There was a push to stay focused on the campaign plan and not the technology and eventually we ended up with a campaign calendar and a preliminary wire frame of the site and no firm technology commitments.
As the details were worked out, the Vancouver-based design studio Cowie and Fox worked magic on the Kleercut logo and branding.
Our next obstacle was determining how to empower online activists to get involved with the campaign through a series of interactions, like signing online petitions, sending targeted faxes and e-mails to Kimberly-Clark decision makers, forwarding postcards to friends, and receiving regular communication from the Kleercut campaigners about specific actions.
The challenge for the Kleercut campaign was that free and open-source campaign toolsets available in September 2004 were either:
- still in pretty major development (like the mass-mailer in CivicSpace)
- mostly pieces that would need to be loosely coupled together (phpList, phPetition)
- not designed with the needs of Canadian campaigns in mind (i.e., not easily made entirely bilingual to support both French and English).
Early on, we had contacted Zack Rosen from CivicSpace to ask about the status of phpList integration with Drupal or the CivicSapce project. Zack had been in touch with phpList’s developer, Michiel, to discuss the work that was being done on a mass-mailer module that would be able to connect to a variety of database-driven mailing engines. We also pulled Mike Gifford of OpenConcept into the conversation to explore the work he had done to integrate other similar tools into the back-end content-management system.
(Since then, several modules have been developed for CivicSpace to support advocacy, including petitions, tell-a-friend tools and a targeted e-mail delivery.)
Along the way, we also explored the following options:
- Democracy in Action
- Actionstudio/AdvocacyNow (recently made open source)
- Activist Mobilization Platform
In each case, the people we connected with were helpful beyond words; it was an illustration of the fluidity and openness in the network that connects so many of the progressive software developers and tech-oriented activists.
Ultimately, it was timing that pushed us to look at other options for the e-mail deployment and, ultimately, for the rest of the activist toolset that exists on the Kleercut.net site. The final decision to use Drupal instead of the CivicSpace branch for basic content management was a last minute choice made on a plane between Toronto and San Francisco. The Drupal team had announced a new stable release; CivicSpace was still based on an earlier version of Drupal. The user interface and theme engine improvements made the choice clear: the site had to be built in the next week and there wasn’t time to wait for CivicSpace to merge the newer version of Drupal into its code.
