CivicSpace, formerly known as Deanspace and Hack4Dean, is a content management system

Content management system

A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

 founded in May 2004 by Zack Rosen and Neil Drumm. As implied by its previous names, it was used to power websites supporting the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean

Howard Dean

Howard Brush Dean III is an American politician and physician from Vermont. He served six terms as the 79th Governor of Vermont and ran unsuccessfully for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. He was chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009. Although his U.S...

. The distribution of the open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 content management system based on Drupal

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and...

 focused on political website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

s. It includes added functionality used for political and other organizing. The innovations in the CivicSpace distribution of Drupal

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and...

 have been incorporated into Drupal 5.0.

CivicSpace began the process of unforking from the Drupal project in March 2005. On July 1 2005, CivicSpace released a fully compatible distribution of Drupal.

CivicSpace founders and employees are actively involved in the Drupal project. Zack Rosen and Kieran Lal are Drupal association board members. Neil Drumm is currently the Drupal 5 maintainer. CivicSpace hired almost 40 hobby developers from the Drupal community over the last three years, providing many with key steps to becoming fully employed to work with Drupal.

CivicSpace was focused on a managed version of CivicSpace to expand beyond the technical users who were the early adopters of the platform. The hosted version was available as a free and low monthly cost subscription service for 22 months. CivicSpace Labs stopped offering its free hosting service as of July 1st, 2008. The source code for the hosted provisioning of Drupal and CiviCRM is being made available.

Please note: The CivicSpace software has been incorporated into Drupal 5 and CiviCRM

CiviCRM

CiviCRM is a web-based, internationalized suite of computer software for constituency relationship management, that falls under the broad rubric of customer relationship management...

 and cannot be downloaded from civicspacelabs.org. Download Drupal software from http://www.drupal.org and the CiviCRM

CiviCRM

CiviCRM is a web-based, internationalized suite of computer software for constituency relationship management, that falls under the broad rubric of customer relationship management...

 module from http://civicrm.org.

Features

• Content management system for Website management
• Blog
  Blog
  A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
  
  ging
• Forum
  Internet forum
  An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
  
  s
• File storage
• Photo galleries
• Polls and surveys
• Social networking
• Event organizing

Sites using CivicSpace

• A large percentage of Democracy for America
  Democracy for America
  Democracy for America is a progressive, people-powered political action committee, headquartered in South Burlington, Vermont. Founded by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean in 2004, DFA leads public awareness campaigns on a variety of public policy issues, trains activists,...
  
   grassroots sites, see
• A blogging site
• Blog for America
• Better Donkey
• 21st Century Democrats

External links

• CiviCRM The open source constituent relationship management system inside CivicSpace.
• Drupal The open source content/community management system inside CivicSpace.
• 64MB and *22MB QuickTime movies of Zack Rosen speaking at Stanford in March 2005 on the CivicSpace project, licensed under Creative Commons and hosted by the Internet Archive
• Deanspace, Social Networks, and Politics by Jon Lebkowsky
  Jon Lebkowsky
  Jon Lebkowsky is an web consultant/developer, author and activist who was cofounder of FringeWare, Inc. . FringeWare, an early attempt at ecommerce and online community, published a popular "magalog" called FringeWare Review, and a literary zine edited by Lebkowsky called Unshaved Truths...
  
  . A chapter of the book Extreme Democracy that describes the Deanspace project in detail.