Informed and well coordinated maritime communities are fundamental to creating safe waters globally. Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP) is a project of the One Earth Future Foundation, a Colorado non-profit that envisions a world beyond war through developing effective, multi-stakeholder systems of governance. OBP mobilizes maritime community stakeholders, develops public-private partnerships at sea and ashore and advocates for international legal change to end maritime piracy.
OBP publishes research and analysis and host summits and workshops to accomplish their mission. During our Discovery Process, we identified that making their research accessible to users in all industries was the greatest goal. OBP’s website needed to both provide hard research for experts, while making the crisis understandable to the uninitiated.
Our User Story and Wireframing process combined OBP’s user base and goals to produce a blueprint of the website’s functionality. For piracy analysts and experts, we built an easily filterable list featuring all of OBP’s publications. We created an interactive guide to international counter piracy efforts that allows users to easily access talking points and areas of impact within eight categories of activity. The pirate attack timeline shows general trends of piracy over the last seven years. The timeline is an excellent entry point for users new to the issue of piracy. It is filled with the stories of individual vessels that were attacked, emphasizing the urgency and importance of the problem. All three of these powerful interfaces are manageable by OBP without touching any code, ensuring the long term sustainability of the project. The website’s look and feel is contemporary and professional with an academic undertone, instilling a sense of legitimacy in OBP’s research and visualizations.
The Open Media Foundation worked with OBP to make their vital research and analysis accessible by audiences of all levels. The website is completely maintainable by OBP’s staff from basic pages to the beautiful custom visualizations, ensuring this project will stand the test of time. It’s also easy to use, which allows OBP’s staff to focus on their mission. Project’s like OBP are possible because our experienced staff leverages open source tools and provides a 50% matching grant to make great technology services available to every non-profit big or small.
