Unidas: community platform for an international network
AI-generated, human-reviewed
Starting point
Unidas is an international initiative for gender equality, started in 2019 at the invitation of the German foreign ministry together with partners from Latin America and the Caribbean. Around 1,000 people belong to the network — spread across two continents, several languages and very different organisations.
A network like this does not live off a website reporting about it, but off a place where its members actually work together. And because it involves people who expose themselves publicly, the question of who sees what from whom is not one setting among many but a precondition.
Solution
A community platform built on Open Social, a Drupal distribution for social networks — delivered together with the Berlin design agency yellow too. Members maintain a profile, found groups, plan events, share posts and images, message each other privately and hold moderated discussions.
What such a platform stands or falls on is not the features but their edges:
- Visibility is controllable per item and per profile field — members decide what the network sees of them
- Language and notifications follow the individual person rather than one default for everyone
- Accessibility to BITV 2.0 as a requirement from the start, not a later correction
- Protection against denial-of-service traffic through Project Shield
Outcome
A working space for a network that only exists distributed: across time zones, languages and organisational boundaries — with a platform that carries the exchange rather than staging it.