We’re very excited to have just helped the International Women’s Health Coalition launch their Young Visionaries campaign! Young Visionaries is a contest designed to help youth who are inspired by human rights and women’s health share their visions for change, and win grants to continue their work. The general public can vote for their favorite visionaries, with final awards decided by IWHC’s panel of guest judges.

Young Visionaries is built on top of Akimbo, the WordPress-powered main IWHC blog. The nomination form allows youth to describe their vision, upload a photo, embed a video, and link to their web site or online profile. We’re using the herculean TDO Mini Forms plugin to provide a usable interface for submission of the nomination form, the Vote It Up plugin for the voting, the Vipers Video Quicktags plugin for handling of the videos, and the Cycle Lite jQuery plugin for the front page slideshow.

On the front end, the application ties in to the impressive Thesis theme already used by Akimbo, functioning essentially as a sub-theme for that section of the site. We used Thesis’ extensive customization and hook structure for most of the Young Visionaries sub-theme, though we did have to modify a couple of core Thesis files to facilitate the sub-theme. Tying it all together is our own custom logic and “glue code”, and theme files specific to Young Visionaries.

A diverse group of Young Visionaries have already been nominated! Have a look and vote for your favorite, or maybe even encourage someone you know to nominate his/herself.

Check out the IWHC Young Visionaries web application on Akimbo!

We just launched threeintentions.com, a web site that will build a community around the idea of the mind / body / spirit connection. The site provides related resources and represents teachers working in the field.

Three Intentions is organized by Brooke Warner, based in Berkeley, who Bad Feather and I worked with closely from conception and initial sketches, to branding and site mocks, to execution in WordPress. The site provides profile information, a blog platform, and event organization for Brooke and the Three Intentions teachers, whose numbers will be growing as the site gains traction.

Take a break from your daily grind to stop by threeintentions.com, and be sure to let Brooke know that Dtek and Bad Feather sent you.

Highest Common Denominator Media Group is a Brooklyn- and Dallas-based film company that has produced some inspiring projects. The Farm: 10 Down, which re-examines the lives of six inmates in Louisiana’s maximum-security Angola prison, 10 years after HCD’s award-winning The Farm first introduced us to them, premiered on the National Geographic channel on Tuesday.

Before the film premier, we worked with HCD to do some serious spring cleaning to their existing WordPress-powered web site. We audited the site, rewrote large portions of their custom theme, cut the number of plugins used on the site by more than half, removed and secured some potentially dangerous code, and worked with HCD to help them better understand how to manage their site.

Thanks to Bad Feather for the introduction! We look forward to continuing our work with HCD, helping them make more proactive and forward-thinking changes to their web sites and online tools, and generally support them in their mission of telling compelling stories that inspire us to action.

We recently worked with Bad Feather to help Paula Murray Cole and the folks at rasaboxes develop a web site for building community around their innovative performance technique.

What is “rasaboxes”? I’m not a dancer, so i’ll quote from the new web site:

Devised in the 1980s and 90s by Richard Schechner, rasaboxes offers performers a concrete physical tool to access, express, and manage their feelings/emotions within the context of performance. Useful as performer training, rasaboxes also has many other applications in various fields including (but not limited to) therapy, business, and education.

Paula and co are off and running at rasaboxes.org, managing all of their site content and developing their membership. The site is built on WordPress, features informational, news, and “members-only” content, as well as tying-in to rasaboxes’ existing mailing list and donation services.

The site is rasaboxes.org.

We love Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) here at Dtek, and since it powers virtually everything we do, it’s crucial to our clients, too. But we don’t often have the chance to discuss it with our community, so I thought I’d write up a bit more about it here.

In the office, we use FOSS everywhere from the WordPress blog software generating the web page you’re reading now, to the OpenOffice software we use to author documents on the desktop, to the entire GNU/Linux operating system that runs on our office computers. And of course the Firefox web browser I’m using to write this is FOSS, too! As far as the services we provide, we build our web sites on a FOSS platform: from the operating system to the web server, database server, and scripting languages.

FOSS represents an entirely new model of collaborative production made possible by the advent of computer networks, and the Internet in particular. Crucially, the “F” in FOSS stands for “free” as in speech, meaning that anyone is free to see how the software works, and modify it as they’d like. (The fact that most FOSS is also “free” as in beer is nice, too!) And that’s exactly how it works: people all over the globe contribute to the development of FOSS, often making small contributions piece by piece. But the resulting software, as my examples above illustrate, can be excellent — rivaling and often surpassing similar projects produced in the more familiar, proprietary/closed manner.

It can be hard to wrap your mind around this idea and its implications at first, but it’s fascinating stuff and at the heart of our new economy and culture. At Dtek, it directly informs our professional ethos and fits our personal convictions, too. Ask us more about FOSS the next time we work together! And if you’re interested, here’s some additional reading we’d recommend:

• The Free Software Definition from the GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation
• Open Source Initiative
• And for you economists out there, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler