CivicSpace, formerly known as Deanspace and Hack4Dean, is a content management system 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. The distribution of the open source content management system based on Drupal focused on political websites. It includes added functionality used for political and other organizing. The innovations in the CivicSpace distribution of Drupal 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.

Features

• Content management system for Website management
• Blogging
• Forums
• File storage
• Photo galleries
• Polls and surveys
• Social networking
• Event organizing