Scouts

Scouting is a global youth Movement that builds friendships, experiences, and skills for life, shaping young people's futures as active citizens. More than 500 million young people and adults have joined and experienced the power of Scouting's non-formal education since it was founded in 1907. Since then, the Scout Movement has continued to grow and is now active in 172 National Scout Organizations with over 57 million young people, supported by millions of dedicated volunteers, take part in Scouting activities and events worldwide. World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM) supports the growth and development of Scouting worldwide to enable more young people and volunteers to experience Scouting's life-changing educational offering.

We were contracted to perform various support operations as requested by the Client. Among many others, the provision of technical support for the existing web platforms of WOSM (the sites based on Drupal 7 and 8 and provided by other vendors), the extension of already existing functionalities as well as the provision of various types of technical advice. The evidence of our work can be seen at Members Portal (members.scout.org), Scouts for SDGs Platform (sdgs.scout.org) and JOTA-JOTI - Largest Online Scout Jamboree (www.jotajoti.info).

We not only created dedicated pages for the organization's sub-projects, but also dealt with integration between systems, moreover, we provide ongoing hosting support. 

We frequently had to work under time pressure, as some of the customer operations required the synchronization of our work assisting numerous activities of our Client pertaining to both offline events as well as global online events  (e.g Jota-Joti – the largest digital Scout event). What is more, WOSM Jota Joti being as massive an event as it is (with over 50 thousand participants every year), required that we had to ensure that the sites are scalable and would perform well.  This required some tweaks on servers and assuring that the cache facility of Drupal is well configured. Additionally, we monitored and tweaked the configuration of customers' servers.

As we worked on the legacy codebase, we had to make sure we understand how the existing codebase was working. Bearing that in mind we had to perform a deep analysis of the existing source code prior to taking any action. Moreover, we operated on a massive amount of data (hundred thousand accounts, content instances etc.), which generated huge performance impact on the site’s behaviour.

We were able to provide several improvements to the existing UX of Jota Joti event and on top of that increase the amount of participants. Owing to our work, all the performance issues during the event were addressed promptly. What is more, due to our efforts, we were able to remove a lot of deprecated content from www.scout.org. When it comes to sdgs.scout.org, we were able to deliver several new features such as the new section of pages plus some improvements to the editorial workflow of content.