Background

WWF’s global mission is to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature.

Building a connection between the public and the work they do on the ground is vital for WWF. The organisation is constantly looking for ways to increase awareness of the environmental threats they are working to tackle and to build on their supporter base.

New technology has changed the way people communicate and audiences now want to consume information more rapidly. WWF introduced new social media feeds to gather this content directly from conservation workers in the field to help highlight the projects they are involved in. This is generating valuable content, which can be used for lobbying governments, engaging the public and monitoring their field work in some of the world’s most remote places.

WWFlife

Priocept have been working with WWF-UK to help deliver a production-ready version of WWFlife, a bespoke Content Management System (CMS) that ingests social media content from their field projects around the globe.

With so much new information flowing into the organisation, WWF needed the system to provide a quick and efficient way to find content related to campaigns they are promoting. The new “WWFlife” application seeks to catalogue and organise the myriad of social media feeds through a user-friendly interface and provides an advanced set of features to achieve this.

WWFlife Features

The WWFlife application has the following features:

• Content Listing – A user-friendly interface allows users to filter content by source, type (e.g. Flickr), content type (e.g. photos), and tags.
• Content Export – Content curators can build arbitrary collections of data, picking individual items from different feeds to build and export a package of useful content. This can then be downloaded as a compressed archive ready for redistribution.
• Search – The application provides a full featured search, allowing users to quickly find relevant items based on tags and content.
• Tag Management – By tagging content, curators can quickly categorise and search for relevant information. The system both ingests tags from social media feeds and allows administrators to add their own. It also provides full tag management with functions for deleting, renaming, and merging tags.
• Content Restriction – Some sources are private feeds that are not available for public consumption. The application allows these sources to be ingested, but marks them as ‘restricted’. Only certain users with the correct access can then view this content.
• User Logging– The application logs all user actions to provide a searchable audit trail for system actions, ensuring accountability and consistency.

Technology

WWFlife makes use of cutting edge web technologies, ingesting content via APIs provided by Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube. It has been built on Google’s cloud computing “Platform-as-a-Service” (PaaS) offering, Google App Engine, and persists data to the Google Cloud Storage service.

As the application is developed and hosted entirely on a cloud-based virtual infrastructure, it is capable of scaling exponentially to meet resource demands, ensuring that the system provides an optimal user experience at all times.