As part of the Case Foundation’s commitment to Open Source, we continue to share the code that powers the technology side of our efforts. Last year, we shared the code for our #FacesofFounders website so that others would benefit from the investment we had made into cutting edge technology. Today, we’re excited to share a new video demonstrating the capability this open source platform provides for those who use and build upon it.
Launched in 2016, #FacesofFounders was a campaign to attract
entrepreneurs, particularly female founders and entrepreneurs of color, to
share their photos and stories of entrepreneurship on FacesofFounders.org.
After a review by a panel of 40 judges, who completed their work using this
open source platform, FastCompany
featured the winners of the campaign. The site has since evolved into a Medium
publication that continues the work of showcasing diverse entrepreneurs driving
innovation and job growth.
Open source, a medium for freely sharing and collaborating
on technology, is yet another way that organizations can give back in the form
of their technology. We believe it is particularly important in the
philanthropic field as it is an opportunity for social innovators to accelerate
their own missions by tapping into the work of the collective community. One
gift of open source code can have unlimited beneficiaries, and we believe it to
be a key component of the ongoing democratization of technology.
Features
This open source platform contains several features from the
#FacesofFounders campaign:
Social Media Profile Photo Filter
The photo upload feature allows visitors to upload a photo
(or select a Facebook or Twitter profile photo) and place a campaign-themed
filter on top of it. The filtered photo can then be turned into profile images
on social media sites, and added to a shared photo wall on a homepage, which will
continually display all new and past filtered photos. Administrators have the
ability to remove inappropriate photos from the homepage.
Story Submission
In addition to—or instead of–uploading a photo, visitors can
submit stories to the judging platform. This submission tool contains
customizable forms and can be placed in a “closed” state once judging begins.
All submissions entered through the form then go into a queue for a site administrator
to assign to judges. Because the platform is built into WordPress, it is also
possible to directly upload submissions via WordPress’s dashboard.
Story Review and Judging
The third and final component of this codebase is the judging platform. As visitors submit stories, they queue in the judging section on the backend. Once all submissions are final, assigned judges can log into the platform and request submissions to review. The judges score each submission on a numeric scale, and the platform uses those scores to begin ranking each submission. Site administrators can then log in and view the stories ranked by their aggregate scores to determine winners. The entire codebase comes packaged as a WordPress theme for easy deployment and visual customization using WordPress’s robust theme system.
How You Can Use This
While the Case Foundation used this to support the
FacesofFounders campaign, we expect that it can be used in a wide variety of
efforts and we can’t wait for you to take advantage of this great project! To
help, we’ve created a detailed technical guide that you and your team can use
to understand how to best utilize the open source code. To access that guide
and more resources, visit the
project’s GitHub page.
To show our commitment to the open source community and the
importance we place on expanding involvement in open source from the
philanthropic sector, we’ve published many of our projects online. To see more
of our work, visit the Case
Foundation’s GitHub page.
We look forward to seeing what you do with these tools and
hope many others will join in this effort and share their open source projects.
Sign up for emails from The Case Foundation
Be the first to know about events we’re hosting, conferences, new resources and learnings, announcements about our programs and more, and get our weekly Breaking Good newsletter covering breaking news in social good.