The client
FORCE11 grew out of the FORC Workshop in Dagstuhl, Germany, in August 2011—the “11” in the name. What started as a small circle is now an open movement: researchers, librarians, archivists, publishers, and funders who want scholarly communication to use the web instead of photocopying the paper.
They treat the organization as a starting point, not a gate. FORCE11 gathers and shares information, invites related projects to connect, and stays a neutral place to find the work—not a body that endorses or blocks it. FORCE11’s manifesto is easy to find. The harder problem is a website that can keep up with a changing community—and still feel like one organization.
The challenge
A movement site is not a product catalog. Priorities shift. People rotate. New formats—software, data, social channels—sit beside the traditional paper. If the CMS only works for the person who built it, the community’s knowledge never makes it onto the page.
FORCE11 needed a partner who would learn the community first: what it values, how those values move, and what “publishing” means when the audience is both a working group and the wider field. Only then did a redesign make sense.
What we did
Learn the community, then build the site
FORCE11 hired Intrepid Network to redesign and develop the website. We spent more than a year in discovery—listening, mapping how the organization actually works, and answering operational questions as they came up—before the public site took its current form. FSCI, the summer institute, sits in that same relationship.
A platform a changing group can run
We tightened content and communication workflows and improved overall performance. Because FORCE11 is an ever-changing group of individuals, the site needed a clear knowledge-sharing path: how a new person learns to publish, not only how a page looks. We produced walkthrough videos for the harder tasks and stayed on call for everyday onboarding.
A long engagement, not a launch day
Support continues through consulting, design, and development. We treat the website as infrastructure for a movement, not a one-time brochure.
The result
FORCE11 has a public home that can absorb new people, new outputs, and new institute years without starting from zero. Staff can learn the system. The organization can keep gathering and sharing work—the job it set for itself in 2011—without the site becoming a bottleneck.
Services
Discovery & community research · Website redesign and development · Content workflow · Performance · Staff training and on-call support · Ongoing consulting, design, and development.
If you or your organization need a site that keeps up with a community, not just a brand guide—we’ll listen.