Random Hacks of Kindness Ottawa Part 2/2
- 05
- Jun
Click here for Part 1 of RHOK Ottawa
Our Project: GirlTank
We spent the weekend working with a project called GirlTank: a community hub and crowdfunding platform designed to help women and girl changemakers grow and scale their daring social enterprises.
I chose to work with GirlTank because Tara, the co-founder of GirlTank, was present at the event, making it infinitely easier to design an effective solution. I also chose GirlTank because microfinance, social entrepreneurship, and gender equality are all development tools I strongly believe in, and GirlTank combines all three!
The Challenge
GirlTank wanted a video library, similar to www.ted.com, so they could showcase all of the ladies they work with. Their requirements were:
- Deeply searchable and categorize-able.
- Easy to manage after the weekend.
- Integrate with their existing Vimeo/Youtube account.
Our Solution: www.davidrs.com/girltank/videos/
Without being too modest, our solution was pretty flippen awesome. It looks good, satisfies everything GirlTank asked for and……is maintainable! This last point should not be undervalued. Too often at weekend hackathons developers forgo maintainability for the sake of building something quickly to show-off at the end of the weekend.
We developed our solution in WordPress, not because it was faster or easier, it really wasn’t, only 2/5 of our team had WP experience, we chose WordPress because GirlTank’s existing site is built on WordPress, so their management and non-tech staff are already familiar with it as a CMS. It has also become so ubiqutios that WordPress developers are relatively common and affordable. These two factors combined mean GirlTank can do basic maintenance in-house, and any additiona modifications will be affordavle. Win-win-win!
