Drupal

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.

This Open Society initiative was set up to conduct research into the impact of privatisation in education around the world. The website was required to help with the important task of generating interest in the research and its findings. With a number of international consultations scheduled within weeks of the website commission, we had to work fast to get the site into shape for its initial outing.

The last PI website rebuild was back in 2004 when we devised what felt like quite an innovative way of cross referencing content. But as is the way with our line of work, what seemed cool and groovy in 2004 had become pretty clunky and out-moded by 2010 (or probably even sooner for web fashionistas). And so the challenge 6 years on, was to refit the ship without losing any of its precious cargo and at the same time get that cargo out of the hold so that people could find it, read it and start taking action on it. And to do all that on very limited resources - of course.

This project grew out of a request to create a Norwegian version of the new Publish What you Pay logo. The Norwegian wing of the global civil society transparency-in-mining coalition was prompted into action after the successful refit of the international website. Localising the logo just involved a bit of rearranging with the country name. The website was a bigger undertaking, as it has a focus on the capacity building work that is particular to pwyp.no.