About
Why the work is being done
Catalyst aims to help civil society organisations to reuse more tech, rather than building custom solutions each time. In order to do this we have set up a series of interventions, one of which is service platforms.
A Service Platform is a turnkey solution to a problem, which just requires deployment, configuration and a minimal amount of customisation before use in a service.
This project is for the delivery of an Alpha version of one of these platforms - Guidance Repositories.
This project is for the delivery of an Alpha version of one of these platforms - Guidance Repositories.
Many charities provide and publish guidance to at least one or more audiences. The primary audience for this solution is professionals seeking guidance relating to their work from charities.
Much of this publishing activity is essentially similar in different charities and we wish to explore how this problem can be solved in a reuse-friendly way with a customised installation of a commodity Content Management System. This system can in turn be customised and configured to suit the expectations, needs and behaviour of the audiences served and the organisational needs of a specific charity.
Problem to solve
How might we create a shared platform for publishing guidance by civic society organisations so that consistency and reuse is maximised?
Who are the users and what do they need to do
- Professionals seeking guidance from charities
- Software developers and project managers in digital suppliers supporting charities.
- Digital teams within charities and civic society organisations.
Description of the work:
- Synthesising the user needs and personas of five charities in a Development cohort.
- Designing with the proposed content, to yield a set of common components and views which represent the guidance content, metadata and associated views (browse, search)
- Creating a customised base version of a commodity CMS which can be used as the basis of creating a guidance repository.
- Helping the charities with lightweight customisation so that they can set up a guidance repository with their content.
Expected outputs include:
- Standardised documentation for the product, including detailed instructions for creating instances of the product in local, staging and production environments
- API documentation
- Configuration documentation
- Weeknotes for the process of development
- Weekly project updates
- Commented source code adhering to best practices
- Product deployed to an alpha environment