Acquia Gives Thanks to Open Source Giants

At Engage New Orleans, our team had the pleasure of celebrating the best examples of our customers' and partners' work through the Acquia Engage Awards. We’ve shared stories of how ambitious brands are closing the CX gap, integrating content and commerce, and increasing donor engagement. 

In 2019, we also introduced a new category to pay homage to our open source roots, and to showcase the organizations contributing back to Drupal. The Open Source Giants category recognizes the strongest contributions to the Drupal ecosystem, whether it be through code contributions, event sponsorship, community mentorship or technical excellence.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving and giving back, we want to commemorate our 2019 winner and finalists in the inaugural Engage Awards Open Source Giants category.

Mediacurrent (Winner) 

Mediacurrent is an open source development and digital marketing agency that partners with enterprise, nonprofit, higher ed and government organizations. They believe in open source principles and adding value back into the community that allows others to improve. Each week, their staff dedicates time to contribute code, maintain modules and add to their repository of open source resources so that others can learn from their work. Some of their ongoing notable contributions include blogs, code, presentations, event planning, case studies and sponsorships.  

Some of the significant ways Mediacurrent has worked to propel the momentum of Drupal forward include:

• 500+ content assets on the Mediacurrent Blog and Resource Center, covering the latest Drupal developments and best practices for digital strategy, UX and design.
• 30+ Drupal case studies sharing lessons learned with the community.
• 75+ Drupal events organized, as well as participation at camps, cons and user groups across the nation.

In 2019, the Mediacurrent development team created Rain: an enterprise-grade Drupal 8 installation profile. Rain provides free, out-of-the-box editorial, administrative and media enhancements to the core Drupal 8 installation. For two years, Mediacurrent conducted audits of the websites they built and identified the common modules, components and needs to create a successful Drupal 8 website. They gathered all their learnings and aligned this toolset in one place to share with the community along with the training resources, so that everyone can leverage Rain.

Elevated Third (Finalist)

With a presence in the Drupal community for more than 11 years, Elevated Third has contributed to Drupal in terms of code, community building and thought leadership. In 2019 alone, Elevated Third spoke at four separate Drupal events. They believe that “the foundation of a strong national and international community is a strong local community.” Whether it’s through sponsorship, organization or expert presentation, their team members take pride in sharing knowledge about enterprise B2B marketing, personalization, performance and admin user experience. Many members of the team were already putting in hours outside of their normal workweek to support Drupal, the community and software project that allowed them to do what they love every day. 

Elevated Third found that the projects they were working on aligned with the needs of their clients and established a contribution budget to reward employees for their efforts and continue pushing these projects forward. A few key achievements that came from this initiative included:

• Release of the 8.x-1.x branch of the Demandbase module and multiple patches merged into the 8.x-1.x branch of the Pardot module
• Beta release of Paragraphs Browser, which makes managing 100+ individual Paragraphs significantly more user-friendly
• Presentations given at DrupalCamp Asheville and DrupalCon Seattle educating attendees on personalization and website-building best practices

Elevated Third understands that “It Takes a Village to Raise a CMS” and that everyone from individuals to large enterprises to digital services to developer teams play a part in making Drupal successful. As an agency, they’re working to promote contributions beyond developer communities and spread awareness and education to the B2B enterprise space including, seamless integrations with marketing tools personalized website experiences and better execution of the entire customer journey at scale. 

Palantir.net and Digital Services Georgia (Finalist)

Full-service web agency Palantir.net believes in a mission to “Create good inside and out.” In the open source community, they do good by sharing their internal Drupal expertise with other individuals and companies to help them elevate their own projects. 

Back in 2016, with the announcement that the Google Search Appliance was reaching its end of life, many government entities and universities started looking around for replacement options. Palantir.net wanted to provide an open source solution that would help constituents find the information they need to stay informed and educated.

So, Palantir.net built Federated Search, which is freely available at Drupal.org and offers the following capabilities: 

• A simple way to store, retrieve and parse content.
• A cross-platform search application.
• A speedy, usable, responsive front end.
• A flexible, extensible, reusable model.

These features of Federated Search made it easier for constituents to find what they need. Palantir.net sought to create a way for enterprise customers to leverage open source search tools in order to enable a networked search across multiple versions of Drupal. When they migrated over 80+  sites from D7 to D8, Digital Services Georgia relied on the Palantir.net team to adapt the current search experience across their websites to new features available in Federated Search, including search filters for site, content type and date range.

As active members in the Drupal community, Palantir team members have made contributions to every facet of the Drupal project: core development, contributed modules, themes, financial assistance, training, documentation, conference organizing and participation on the Board of Directors and Advisory Board for the Drupal Association. 

Thank you to all of our Open Source Giants for setting an exceptional precedent for what it means to give back. To hear more of the inspiring stories from this year’s Engage Awards, check out our gallery of winners and finalists.