WE BUILD Consortium Chooses Drupal-Based Open Social for European Digital Autonomy

Staff Reporter

The WE BUILD Consortium has selected Open Social, a Drupal-based Community Collaboration Platform, to power its new European digital infrastructure, underscoring a growing shift toward digital sovereignty and open standards within the European Union.

As shared by Drupal Nederland on January 5, 2026, the platform became operational in October and supports collaboration among more than 180 public and private entities across Europe. The initiative is part of the European Wallet Ecosystem, which aims to unify secure transactions and identity services across business-to-business (B2B), business-to-government (B2G), and business-to-consumer (B2C) environments.

Open Social is hosted entirely within European cloud infrastructure, with no dependence on U.S. providers or technologies. This architectural decision reflects a wider European concern over data privacy, digital independence, and the extraterritorial scope of laws like the U.S. CLOUD Act, which allows access to data stored outside the U.S. if managed by American firms.

“For WE BUILD Consortium, it was crucial to choose a platform that is not only secure, but also fully European and based on open standards,” said Joost Fleuren, coordinator of WE BUILD Consortium on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce. “Open Social offers just that: a powerful, extensible solution, which enables our participating organisations to work together in a secure and sovereign way on Europe's digital future.”

Built on Drupal, Open Social provides a flexible and scalable open-source foundation tailored for multi-organisation collaboration. To further enhance its functionality, the platform will soon integrate Gaia AI, an artificial intelligence layer that remains fully hosted within European infrastructure. Gaia AI will support:

Intelligent search across extensive project documentation
A contextual chatbot trained on ecosystem-specific data
Automatic document summarisation and interpretation
Secure, efficient access to organisational knowledge without external AI dependencies

This development positions WE BUILD as a model for secure, scalable, and sovereign digital cooperation across the EU, showcasing Drupal’s role in enabling strategic public infrastructure built on open-source values.

Reference: Europe opts for digital autonomy with the Drupal-powered platform Open Social, Stichting Drupal Nederland (5 January 2026)

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