Search support: ActionApps, 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!