Afghan2010.com

Democracy International's goal was to create greater transparency in the election monitoring process in Afghanistan using social media and other digital technology. Our team developed the concept for Afghan2010.com, a website used to report in near real time what was happening on the ground during the 2010 Afghan Parliamentary elections. In two weeks, we developed the website’s brand, design, and deployed the website on a modified implementation of Activ8.

Homepage:

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Our team worked with the Afghanistan and DC-based teams and our mapping and data visualization partner, to map the results of the past three election cycles to display voting trends across various demographics. We integrated Drupal with a custom OpenGeo mapping server to display the mapping application. We built an interactive table to make it easier for users to sort through election results.

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Democracy International knew this site would serve many audiences, including Afghan voters, policy makers, NGOs, etc. They desired an advanced search interface that would allow people to quickly find content that is most relevant to their needs. We implemented an Apache Solr search backend using Acquia’s hosted Solr solution and developed a custom front-end interface for displaying search results.

Our team built a custom “live search” module that displayed search results in real time, broken out by content type as a user typed keywords into the system.

We also built a custom faceted search interface that allowed users to sort and filter by content type, topics, author, etc.

As the site was going to serve individuals from all over the Middle East, mainly Dari and Pashto speakers, Democracy International needed support for content in both languages. We deployed Drupal’s content translation modules to enable teams on the ground to translate content into both languages.

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For ease of use, we implemented administrative and reporting screens that made tracking workflow of content translation easy for both team members in DC and on the ground.

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One of Democracy International’s main goals was to report what was happening on the ground in real time, which is a dramatic shift from the standard election monitoring process that often does not present any information for months after election missions end. We modified our newsroom feature to allow DI to post “Media Summaries,” or daily digests of what was happening in Afghanistan, along with other news updates. We integrated Activ8 with Windows Live Writer so the team on the ground, which often did not have internet access, could create stories and publish them live to the site via a desktop application that then automatically synced to the site when a connection was gained.

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We also developed a custom multimedia gallery that allowed Democracy International to post dynamic content from Flickr and Youtube to visually tell the story of their election-monitoring mission.

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