Shorebank Pacific Enterprise

Shorebank Pacific Enterprise was a project undertaken from 2000 to 2003. In addition to a straightforward public side presence listing the services, story, and resources of the organization, I also created, with the aide of a couple of other developers, a sophisticated internal communications site. SEP had a staff of more than 20 people distributed over four offices. They were a financial services non-profit with significant concerns about security, and the impact of their programs across ecolological, community, and economic vectors.

There were two primary sections of the internal site:

• The Pipeline -- This area was where all departments tracked projects and activities. Most employees were tracking about 20 projects. The pipeline generated summaries of fiscal status and priority activities and was used as the cornerstone of the bi-weekly status meetings. All staff members were able to enter and modify their own projects, and senior staff could quickly get an overview of anyones focus and current status on a given project. All pipeline projects were searchable by person, priority, internal program, and pipe. In addition measurable impacts like 'job creation' and 'linear feet of riparian zone' were tracked for all pipeline items.
• Markets Information -- This was a growing dataset of markets information with three goals. 1) To create continuity between different activities and people in SEP which generated markets knowledge. 2) To allow sophisticated retrieval of this information so that unanticipated synergies could be identified (for instance an employee using the dataset to research markets for fresh caught fish might uncover a cross-marketing opportunity with a forest products firm). And 3) to provide valuable information for SEP clients. The dataset was populated in an ongoing fashion by all staff members and was designed to handle everything from an interesting news item, to a three day workshop, to a lunch conversation. Design concerns included the responsive processing and retrieval of a couple thousand records, complex categorization schemes, ease of entry so that employees wouldn't feel burdened by participation, and a careful control and publishing scheme so that sensitive, or incomplete, information would not get onto the client side data.
• The internal SEP website also included areas for the up- and downloading of files, access to all policy and proceedure documents as well as all forms used by the organization (intake forms, vacation requests, letterhead, expense forms), and an area for internal discussions.