USAID Web Projects
Process
Development Experience Clearinghouse
The Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) serves as a repository for hundreds of thousands of documents for USAID projects. USAID projects submit evaluations and other related documents to the DEC to share knowledge throughout the agency and its partners. Projects submit documents such as evaluations for their projects and that kicks off a whole process where the content team has to categorize these documents. The project desperately needed automation to keep up with the volume of documents being submitted on a daily basis.
Firstly, the public site: dec.usaid.gov was a built on a .Net based CMS called Presto, the off the shelf solution for Text Analytics was built in Java. The first goal was to develop middleware that connected the two applications.
The basic workflow was when a user submits a new document to the site, it kicks off a process where that document is ran through a text analytics application where it contains a variety of modules based on various categorization profiles. Those profiles included Geographic Descriptors, Authors, Language Detector, Primary subjects and other taxonomies. After documents are ran through those profiles, the information was compiled into an XML and uploaded to the Presto API.
To minimize server load we batched files that were uploaded and ran these profiles overnight and emailed us results that next morning to review if there were any errors. This project was a huge value for the content team to stay up to date with the constant submissions.
Other tasks included implementing a google search appliance which allowed for a more robust search experience, redesign of homepage, connection with the Kaltura API to serve media assets on the site, an automated solution to hide restricted PDF's and developed the DEC API for public entities to access the DEC's data.
Technologies used: C#, Java, JS/JQuery
Enterprise Reporting Portal
This application was to house data from multiple reporting systems in USAID. The business intelligence team needed a dashboard to view reports from a variety of projects in the agency. This application needed to connect house to multiple reporting systems in USAID.
We developed an application for leadership to sell the idea of a system that will integrate all internal data sources. The next step was to develop the API that would injest those data sources and display via dashboard.
Technologies used: AngularJS, Bootstrap
Internal App Store
The agency had a number of internal applications they wanted to distribute via an in-house storefront. We developed a single page application using AngularJS and featured a way to toggle between a list view and icon view.
USAID News Reader
The client wanted to aggregate all of the agency’s RSS Feeds in one place via a mobile app. he client wanted to aggregate all of the agency’s RSS Feeds in one place via a mobile app on both Android and iOS. Historically, they only targeted iOS platforms. We built the app was built using Ionic platform to target both iOS and Android. This app was one of the first Android applications in the agency.
