Search support: multi-lingual

FERN’s European Union advocacy work is focused on protecting forests and defending the rights of forest peoples. They approached us in 2008 with a familiar tale of a website that was not keeping pace with the growth and change in their activities. More of their content was being written in French as well as English and the volume and diversity of their publications was lost in a system that didn’t index it usefully.
We set up a new Drupal site for FERN with a French language sub-section, and a much more powerful publications search.

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.

This rebuild project was timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the journal. Although the printed version has had an online presence for nearly 10 years now, this new Drupal site is the boldest departure DIP has yet made from its printed form. The content is still available in its conventional volume/issue listing. But the careful keyword indexing on all journal abstracts, means that you can now sort abstracts into topic and regional lists.

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

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.

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 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.