Sustainable Cities Institute

Home Depot Foundation, 2009

Challenge

Create a web-based community where sustainability thought leaders can share and spread information

The Home Depot Foundation and creative partner IDEA Engineering, came to Carbon Five with a vision. The vision involved creating a new initiative around an interactive website, where a community of individuals and groups interested in sustainable practices can learn and share. This new initiative was named The Sustainable Cities Institute (SCI).

The SCI website provides interactive tools, enabling collaboration between individuals via documents, forums, videos and other content rich web pages. The Home Depot Foundation and other partner organizations publish the vast amount of content required to keep the SCI website current and full of information. The Home Depot Foundation required the technical background and expertise to create this vision, and that is where Carbon Five stepped in.

Solution

An experienced Agile engineering team and a proven content management system

The foundation of the SCI website is built on Carbon Fiveʼs CMS platform, SmileMaker. With SmileMaker, The Home Depot Foundation and their partners are able maintain the content of the SCI website while meeting the demanding requirements of the user community. In addition, SmileMaker provides a full suite of administrative functions required to maintain the site with little or no intervention of technical staff.

A robust CMS platform alone was not enough to fulfill the vision of the SCI website. With Carbon Fiveʼs agile software development process, functionality not provided by a CMS platform was quickly identified and designed. The Carbon Five engineering team created custom Java-based solutions to fulfill the enhanced community driven features of the SCI website. With an agile software development process, The Home Depot Foundation was closely involved with providing guidance and approval for the features Carbon Five was delivering on a weekly basis. This in turn eliminated ambiguities surrounding the requirements and costs associated with building a large-scale website.

Value

A sustainable future

As an experienced team engineers delivering large-scale websites, Carbon Five provided knowledge and training for managing high-performance, content rich websites. Together with Carbon Five and SmileMaker, The Home Depot Foundation has a system where several editors and administrators can independently contribute to the maintenance and vision of the SCI website.