Adopting Open Principles: Better Collaboration with WordPress
Greenpeace wanted to consolidate their technology platforms, and move towards open and collaborative working practices. They chose WordPress to help them adopt better open principles in their workflows and processes.
*This post is co-authored by Ana Silva, Luca Tiralongo, Adrian McShane, and John Bevan.
Greenpeace is one of the best-known and largest non-profit organisations in the world, with a huge supporter base and potential for international impact. Their campaigns have been responsible for real-world change, and have demonstrated their significant influence in driving people to action.
In 2016, Greenpeace International began discussions on the benefits of operating with more open practices and processes while developing their new digital presence, Planet 4. From the very beginning, the organisation committed to having these discussions in public, inviting contributions from various stakeholder groups, and welcoming comments and contributions from outside the organisation.
Greenpeace soon made the decision to build Planet 4 on WordPress, calling out the benefits of open source, building common cause with WordPressers, and appealing to the WordPress community to help Greenpeace open source their movement. As WordPress specialists, Human Made had recently worked with Greenpeace Brazil on their ‘Arms around the Amazon’ campaign. We naturally followed the Planet 4 developments with interest, and as vocal advocates for open source software and practices, we were eager to support the adoption of open source in an organisation of Greenpeace’s size and calibre.
Open Values, Open Technology
Greenpeace had previously used WordPress for both campaign and institutional websites, and enjoyed the publishing capabilities native to the system. Once they’d revisited their choices for a CMS they could use across the organisation, and started discussing adopting open working practices, open source software became crucial to the plan, and WordPress emerged as their preferred choice.
The benefits of open source, open technology, and open values, are numerous; and at Human Made this has contributed positively to our business, culture, and projects. Being open drives the adoption of new channels of communication, and makes those channels more accessible to a wider range of people. Open source inspires coordination between departments, and encourages fluidity and flexibility in processes. All of this can enable organisations to work more efficiently, inclusively, and productively.
For Greenpeace, an independent organisation working to change behaviour and attitudes, the positive effect of adopting open source values and technology are boundless. Working openly, Greenpeace can generate greater and more widespread support for the environmental cause, bringing it to the attention of a more diverse audience, and encouraging new supporters of the organisation to take action. By opening the Planet 4 project to the public Greenpeace are enabling a wider pool of distributed talent to apply their skills to the cause. Now Greenpeace supporters can contribute in the ways that best suit them; a developer, for example, might be more inspired and motivated to volunteer code, than to sign a petition.
Knowledge transfer, code reviews, and open collaboration
Once Human Made joined the project, we spent some time with the Greenpeace team to align the product vision with short-term deliverables. Working both remotely and joining an in-person meetup, we managed to arrive at a shared understanding of terminology and structure, as well as how these would be communicated to the design teams.
Although we joined the project after it had kicked-off, the open nature of the processes and workflows made it much easier for us to integrate with the Greenpeace team and get onboarded. Due to tight deadlines and pressure to launch the new website, the time allocated to solve open issues and the clear long-term plan made a huge difference to the success of the project.
Our involvement with Planet 4 spanned both strategy and technology consultancy. One of Greenpeace’s major requirements for our partnership was to ensure their in-house technical team could benefit from working closely with WordPress specialists. We proposed undergoing code reviews and quality time with their in-house team, to share our deep WordPress expertise. With this approach, the Greenpeace team progressed rapidly, and by the end of our involvement in the project, they had expanded their technical team to five in-house WordPress developers.
Building this technical capacity in Greenpeace’s team is one of the most valuable aspects of our involvement with Planet 4, as is our participation supporting an organisation in their adoption of more open source software, practices, and values.
About Human Made & WordPress
Human Made are a leading provider of WordPress platforms, and one of the leading contributors to the WordPress project.
We build powerful digital solutions for enterprise-clients and big publishers: delivering technically complex WordPress instances at scale and transforming the way people interact with some of the most visited websites in the world.
