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8trees Intranet
Situation: Transferring and managing knowledge is a major challenge for all organizations. It’s an even greater challenge when an organization is trying to communicate among geographically dispersed teams. After building several custom tools to improve knowledge management, we saw the need to build an affordable intranet that could work right out of the box for many organizations.
Solution: We built a clean intranet – we call it 8 Trees – that has all the basic elements teams need to improve knowledge management and communications: a blog with commenting for discussions, a shared calendar, and a space to hold and work with documents. 8 Trees’ simple workflow makes it intuitive to use and, combined with its powerful communications tools, leads to huge performance improvements within teams.
Strategy Focus
Pandemic Preparedness: When Data Visualization and Workflow Matter
Mapping on-the-ground public health organizations' capacity to respond to outbreaks
Mapping on-the-ground public health organizations' capacity to respond to outbreaks
We just finished working on the Pandemic Preparedness Capacity Project, a new tool for InterAction and USAID that will be used to help prevent the spread of catastrophic disease outbreaks, especially bird flu. The goal of the site is to both improve both data collection from public health organizations on the ground and improve data visualization for policy makers here in Washington, D.C. We built this dynamic mapping portal on all open source software: the content management system is Drupal and the mapping stack is running on Mapnik, a C++/Python GIS toolkit.
We had a lot of fun working directly with Elizabeth Bellardo at InterAction, along with several other members on her team, to develop a strategy for making data collection, site administration and data presentation all incredibly simple. In addition to the strategy, we also did the site architecture, design, and development (of both Drupal and Mapnik). I want to use this post to show some of the behind-the-scenes details that are only available to the site administrators and the NGOs using the site.