web projects

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.

The biggest challenge in designing the new site for the APC was in meeting the diversity of needs of its different audiences. The site needed to act as a one stop shop for: publicly accessible resources on open access to ICTs, a private members’ area for the diverse network of APC member organisations, and a virtual office intranet for the APC staff around the world.
This complex mix of audiences and content is presented in a clear and logical navigation with a raft of exciting features

Building Communications Opportunities Alliance (BCO) is made up of NGOs and donor organisations working collaboratively on projects based on communication for development. The alliance website needed a mixture of public and private spaces to present project news to outsiders, and share meeting minutes and draft reports in logged-in spaces between partners.

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!

Creative exchange had been managing their subscriptions and publication distribution operations with a complex series of offline databases. Their need was to consolidate the databases and integrate them with their public website, so that the data could be accessed and managed by any authorised users.

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.

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.

This site was built to monitor the communication rights debate and discussion emerging from the changing information communication technologies landscape. It makes a radical departure from conventional formal navigation systems by using free tagging to structure content. After struggling to come up with a one-size-fits-all hierarchical structure for the content of the site, we abandoned the hierarchy and developed a right hand menu which Drupal dynamically generates from the keyword ‘tags’ which writers have attached to their content, allowing readers to construct their own themed lists of articles.

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.

The public site of the International Development Education Association of Scotland (IDEAS) needed a robust and clear navigation that could serve a fairly diverse audience with easily accessible development education resources. Meanwhile IDEAS Members needed a private space for work-based discussion and access to internal documents.
Drupal’s finely grained permissions system made it possible for us to construct these differently tuned areas of the site with their contrasting access permissions and tools, behind a single IDEAS front door.

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.

The Oxford Research Group’s intranet was designed to respond to the changing needs of the organisation as increasing numbers of staff began working from different locations.

Their requirement was to have an office intranet where shared files could easily be accessed, edited and stored by all staff regardless of location. They were unhappy with staff outside of the Oxford office (where their shared server was hosted), having to first download documents, work on them locally, and then upload them back to the server.
We developed an intranet for ORG that had a file store that they could experience as though it were on a locally networked server, regardless of location. So now all workers can open files in the file store, work on them and save them without going through the uploading and downloading process.

The Global Call for Action Against Poverty is the international coalition which supported national White Band anti-poverty campaigns such as the UK’s ‘Make Poverty History’. The GCAP website project was the result of a collaboration between GreenNet and our sister networks – Choike in Uruguay and Laneta in Mexico. The site features daily news updates in 4 languages, e-campaigning tools, poverty stats mapping, and a photo gallery. We’re also pleased to announce that GCAP has been the recipient of the 2005 International Achievement Award for Excellence in Communication given by Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

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.