ActionApps

In 2004, GreenNet was commissioned by the ‘Catalysing Access to ICTs in Africa’ project (component 1a), to design a technical solution for a telecoms licensing ‘One Stop Shop’ – basically everything you ever wanted to know about telecommunications regulations and licenses across Africa under one roof. We designed the system with a distributed database built on ActionApps, which comprises 64 independent nodes.

GreenNet rebuilt the Genewatch web site in 2006. The volume of new content flowing onto the old static site was making site management too labour intensive. The new site needed to make lighter work of content management, and improvements to the site structure. We developed it using ActionApps (AA), and used it to successfully pilot a new approach to dynamic navigational menus in AA – something which developers had been struggling with for some time.

In 2003, the Conference of Socialist Economists had the entire 26 year archive of their printed quarterly magazine ‘Capital and Class’, scanned and digitised. The challenge then was to build a website which would add value to a journal subscription by providing searchable access to this archive. The finished site includes a secure online subscription feature, an HTDig/AA integrated search which indexes all PDF previews of back issues, and a simple process for updating by CSE staff.

The DEA had managed a static site for several years when they approached GreenNet for a solution to their changing publishing needs. Their growing databases of publications and contacts needed an online home which the static site simply couldn’t accomodate. After working together with DEA on a new architecture for the more sophisticated dynamic site, we developed this resource rich site of materials and services for the education sector. The databases of contacts and publications are fully searchable and easy to update.

Development in Practice is a quarterly academic style journal from the Oxfam publications stable. In 2004 they asked us to take a fresh look at their web presence, which had been managed as a static site for the previous 4 years. Their need was for a more dynamic site which would make it easier for their small staff to keep the site updated. There was also a sense that much of the site’s content could be made easier to find for the readers and researchers using the site.

The IWPR works on free media projects in conflict zones, as a way of promoting peace and democracy. Staff are spread out in offices in ten countries, from where they support local journalism initiatives in getting news out. The website fits into the picture as part of IWPR’s role as an “electronic samizdat,” supporting local reporters under siege and utilising new technologies to disseminate their reporting in country, regionally and internationally.
The site was initially built in 2004 using ActionApps. The nature of the site’s readers and writers required us to develop a system that could support content in any number of languages and scripts.

Privacy International is a human rights group working as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations. It has conducted campaigns and research globally on issues ranging from wiretapping and national security, to ID cards, video surveillance, data matching, police information systems, medical privacy, and freedom of information and expression. In 2003 GreenNet rebuilt the PI site with a new interface fronting a database for all content, old and new. Structurally it is based on a single database table. It features a two-level category menu, and further menus that allow users to narrow down the selection of listed items. The extensive database contains hundreds of articles. And the site itself serves as an excellent model for functional information architecture.

The Electronic Immigration Network (EIN) web project involved a total rebuild of the EIN’s old ASP website. The site is now powered at every level by ActionApps, allowing for content from 6 complex databases of legal material (legislation, case law reports, country reports, online legal resources, a calendar, job vacancies) to dynamically update the site. An initial 16,000 documents were imported into the site from the former database in October 2002. The site now houses more than 100,000 documents.

After GreenNet won the tender process for this high profile project, we were given just 5 weeks to build a site that would work as the main administrative organ of this major event. We worked with ActionApps to build a system that could process secure payments for tickets and handle multilingual publication of content in five languages

With the rising profile of the annual Fair Trade fortnight, in 2006 the Fair Trade Foundation commissioned GN to add an interactive calendar to list events, and make it easy for users to find events in their area. They wanted something quick and inexpensive, and at the same time needed it to integrate seamlessly with their site. The ActionApps CMS provided an ideal solution as it’s designed to enable dynamic elements to be added onto any website.
We created the custom fields required for their events listing, and then used an interactive UK map as the interface for users to select their region.

Forests Monitor investigates the forest industry to empower forest-dependent people and raise public awareness, as part of an effort to increase transparency and accountability of the sector.
In 2006 Forests Monitor had a static presence on the web, and they asked us to rebuild the site so that it could make a greater contribution to supporting the transparency and outreach work of the organisation. We used ActionApps to create a database backend for the site. This allowed for easy updating of all sections by FM staff, as well as the integration of the hitherto separate ASP database of forestry projects, into the main site.

Thanks to Women Living under Muslim Law’s visionary attitude to online work they became one of GreenNet’s first dynamic website clients back in 2002. We built the site with ActionApps and it quickly became a content rich site with daily additions to their News, Calls to action and Publications, all thematically and regionally categorised and searchable. After launching the site in English, it was later developed to include Arabic and French versions.
In 2008, the site was migrated to Drupal.

From Free and Open Source software to Intellectual Property Rights, to Liberalising Community Radio Licensing, the 6 CATIA (1c) ICT policy ‘Animators’ are working to engage local civil society organisations in their local ICT issues. The Animators, based in Ethiopia, Nigeria, DR Congo, Uganda, Senegal and Kenya, all required accessible, affordable, functional campaign sites. And they needed them fast!

This website was commissioned by the APC at very short notice to support the campaign for affordable international bandwidth in Africa, in time for the Mombasa consultations.
The site was built using ActionApps, and was designed to make minimal content management demands on project workers. Indeed much content is automatically fed through from the APC’s African ICT policy monitor website.
In the event, the site was listed as providing source material for a raft of mainstream media coverage of the situation.

The Global Transparency Initiative (GTI) is a network of civil society organisations promoting openness in the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), such as the World Bank, the IMF, the European Investment Bank and Regional Development Banks. The GTI brings together two communities of activists and experts from around the world – one, those groups campaigning for full accountability in the use of public power vested in the IFIs; the other, groups that have been campaigning for the right to access to information at the nation-state level. We developed GTI’s website using ActionApps dynamic content and content sharing technology. The finished site includes a calendar and extensive database of resources and organisations.