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Analysis

Estrategia is a small Non-governmental Organisation working on community-based housing projects in the Barrios of Lima. Estrategia have three core staff members including a director, a gender-projects officer, and a secretary.

Estrategia's requirement was for a website with Spanish content that could be maintained in-house, which would enable them to "tell the world about [their] projects and the struggle of the people [for whom they work]."

The known options available to Estrategia at the time were either to employ a professional web-developer, or to train a staff member in the usage of a proprietary software html-builder. With insufficient funds to pay a private web-development company, Estrategia opted to train a staff member - Rosa, the gender-projects officer - how to develop a website.

This decision quickly rewarded Estrategia with a very basic website. However, as Estrategia's requirements evolved, Rosa's capacity to satisfy these demands was increasingly placed under pressure. Estrategia soon decided that they needed additional features for their website, such as English language content and a 'discussion space' for parallel projects to communicate.

Despite Rosa's best efforts she was unable to satisfy these growing requirements, given her current web-development skills. What's more, the time Rosa was taking to maintain the website using the html-editor was preventing her from focusing on her primary work, where her particular skills could be put to better use.

Faced with these problems, upon the suggestion of a supporting NGO, Estrategia contacted AWF Services. Having struggled with a complex medium for several months Estrategia was soon convinced of the advantages, in terms of User Operation, of adopting the AWF system.

Following the user operation guidelines Rosa was quickly able to take on the role of website editor, rather than website developer, which allowed her to focus on the fundamental concern of producing quality content. Furthermore, client process guidelines and consulting support helped Rosa manage the general communication function of the Estrategia website, in addition to managing the production and maintenance of appropriate content.

Since the AWF system is a PublicGood, the implementation of Estrategia's (at the time unimplemented) requirement to operate the system in Spanish, means that new users of the AWF may read the AWF system in Spanish, without incurring a specific charge for usage of this feature.