FutureToday - community and events website

FutureToday is a worldwide unique change-maker platform for new thinking. It supports all those who want to share their knowledge, start new collaborations, develop innovative business models, generate positive impact, build new clusters, or simply join in. Because it's all about rethinking the world.

The project's goal is to enable new ways of thinking and acting that create a positive impact for everyone and to make sustainable economic activity and life the new paradigm of a global world. This overcomes the old contradictory way of thinking and enables a systemic perspective on the current challenges. On the basis of the diversity of the members and the power of their collective ideas, creativity, innovations, and new perspectives are made possible, which help each individual to develop themselves further and to help work towards creating a positive impact for all.

The client needed a platform for different business conferences, where attendees of these conferences were able to find and match with each other based on their interests and expertise.

We decided to use Open Social because it already has groups created in Drupal and any user can join any group - this is an out-of-the-box functionality. We wanted to tailor the feature specifically to conferences - the user creates an account, then joins the group which is named the same as the name of the conference. 

All other users attending the conference also have accounts and are part of the same group. You can have different conferences, and each has their own group, so there’s no need for each conference having its own page.

We needed to create a custom module that allowed a kind of “match-making” of conference attendees based on selected tags. Users complete their profile with their interests and expertise alongside other information, then an algorithm matches them based on their common interests and expertise - think of it as a kind of “Tinder for business”. We didn’t need to implement geolocation tracking, as this aspect is already taken care of by the specific conference group.

By clicking “Match with this user”, a notification is sent to the user with a connection request. If they confirm, they get a confirmation message and are then transferred to chat. Everything still happens in Open Social - we connected this to their native notification module. This is the only way to connect with another conference attendee, through these common interests.

It’s also mobile friendly and has responsive design. The client initially wanted a native application, but due to budget constraints we decided on a PWA (progressive web application) solution. The user can create a shortcut on their phone’s home screen and is able to access it in the same way as they would an app.

Open Social already had a kind of PWA module framework, but the out-of-the-box functionality wasn’t yet optimized, so we had to tweak it and upgrade it with our own functionality. We had to make it possible to receive native-like notifications even when the browser isn’t open. 

Drupal’s PWA module was used for extending Open Social’s existing functionalities. The functionality of a PWA depends on the browser/operating system. 

Open Social was without question the perfect choice for this project, as it already covered approximately 90% of the required features out-of-the-box. Our job was to develop the match-making feature and execute the PWA implementation.