On the heals of our recently released survey that looked at foundations and their websites, I spoke with one of our clients, John Theodore, a Technology Officer at the Annenberg Foundation, about their choice to go with Drupal for their website redesign. The Annenberg Foundation, founded in 1989, provides funding and support to nonprofit organizations in the United States and globally. They have a number of web properties that serve different aims and programs. The Foundation decided to begin migrating their web properties from a variety of mostly proprietary or home-grown systems to Drupal in 2010. The work is ongoing and CivicActions is working with the Foundation on the project.
Why Open Source?
John admitted to something of a bias against proprietary systems based on the Foundation's experiences as well as his own personal history as a developer and vendor. Proprietary systems often don't communicate well with each other and thus become their own silos. Vendor and support options are also more limited for proprietary systems.
