Terms of Reference
Consultant, Knowledge Management and Web Development
RETAINER CONTRACTApplications deadline: October 9th, 2017
RECOFTC – The Center for People and Forests is a not-for-profit international organization with its headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand. It specializes in capacity building for community forestry i.e. supporting local people to gain rights over forest resources and manage them. RECOFTC engages in strategic networks and effective partnerships with governments, non-government organizations, civil society, the private sector, local people, and research and educational institutes throughout the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. With 30 years of international experience and a rights-based approach to capacity building – involving research and analysis, demonstration sites, and training products – RECOFTC delivers innovative solutions for people and forests.
In 2013, RECOFTC moved the website (www.recoftc.org) to Drupal as a solution to the increased regional and national operations – with country offices becoming more active with national and regional projects. Annex A provides more information on the need for RECOFTC s knowledge management of 30 years of accumulated experience and documentation (including publications include brochures, issue papers, policy briefs, posters, reports, research papers, and training manuals).
Duties and Responsibilities
The Knowledge Management (KM) and Website Developer shall work closely with the Strategic Communication Manager and a designated RECOFTC design team. He/She will be responsible for redesigning and redeveloping the www.recoftc.org website as well as providing support to a RECOFTC Public Institutional Document Repository. The contract period will be for a maximum of 6 months but given the nature of the expanded scope of work, extensions are feasible.
I. Specific duties
Based on the aforementioned scope of work, the Knowledge Management (KM) and Website Developer will troubleshoot and debug www.recoftc.org as needed and have the following specific duties and responsibilities:
● Consolidation of existing RECOFTC publications into an online knowledge base and institutional document repository.
◦ Create an auto-play setting for video content on pages with stories (stories of change and news)to help users engage with the RECOFTC web page; and ◦ Suppo t i de elopi g a e p oje t e pages fo ‘ECOFTC s V4MF p oje t
◦ I lose oo di atio ith ‘ECOFTC s Mo ito i g a d E aluatio tea , de elop a d implement a monitoring and evaluation system for publication downloads
◦ In close coordination ith ‘ECOFTC s CDTS U it, desig a d i ple e t a integrated e-learning strategy for curriculum distribution and blended learning activities.
◦ Ad-hoc support on debugging website as issues arise
The site should be designed following best practices including stakeholder engagement and activity-based decision making. The new site should clearly represent the communication and advocacy objectives of RECOFTC, as well as exploit modern approaches to building an
integrated communication platform, including:
● A consolidated communication strategy, with blog, stories, news, events all brought back into a coherent structure (including re-integrating the separate WordPress-based RECOFTC blog).
● A modern design
● An e-zine like storytelling platform with broad appeal providing access to broader and t aditio al o u i atio st ategies as opposed to o l t aditio al i te atio al de elop e t fo used p og a su ess sto ies, outputs, out o es et . . The sto telli g platform can also be used as a behavior change communication tool, helping to elevate the status of communities and economically disadvantaged groups, while also helping to change attitudes and behaviors related to conservation, livelihood improvement, land tenure, and climate as well as the broader issues associated with community forestry across the region.
● Strong social media integration and integration with social as well as other communication channel strategies.
● Improved search features and
● Multi-language support – both interface and content translation support, as well as partner country-focused areas – including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
II. Qualification and Experience
Essential
● More than 8 years hands-on experience working with Knowledge Management systems ● More than 6 years hands-on experience working with Drupal
● Demonstrated hands-on experience with conversion from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8
● Working knowledge of system analysis, design, development and integration of both online and hardcopy document repositories.
● Good verbal and written English communication skills
Desirable:
● Public-service oriented and versatile with exceptional interpersonal and communication skills,
● Experience in working with non-profit or knowledge-based international organizations is a plus
● Experience in creating responsive websites that support mobile, tablet, and desktop devices ● Experience with developing a website with multi-language support
● Mi i u of Ba helo s Deg ee i computer science or related field
Interested firms are requested to submit CVs, a detailed proposal with budgetary cost estimates (including daily rates) and the proposed schedule periods for the three key deliverables: 1) Document repository; 2) Website redesign and implementation; and, 3) e-learning strategy for curriculum distribution. Proposals should also contain references and current contact details to apinita@recoftc.org.
Open until suitable candidate found.
Annex A: Public Institutional Document Repository -
RECOFTC publications include brochures, issue papers, policy briefs, posters, reports, research papers, training manuals as well as other program- and research-related material and outputs. Collectively these documents represent 30 years of accumulated experience and knowledge and are of enormous value to students, researchers, academics, practitioners, and local communities.
RECOFTC publications are currently available from the main RECOFTC website. Documents were previously published directly to the website by publication type and thematic area. A new Document Management Databases (the PDF publishing system) was developed in-house, and is now being used to store publications in an internal database. At the moment, documents are submitted to the librarian at RECOFTC for classification and storage in the new system. Once stored, a link is given to the website user in order to publish a title, abstract, and classify the title on the website, as well as embed the given link to the source document. For country level publications, the process is even more convoluted and requires that the document be classified twice – once in the new document management system, and once again on the RECOFTC website (some of which is not happening for national level publications in local languages). The document management database also now serves the documents directly from the new system
ia a po t add essed li k –su h as…
http://dev.recoftc.org:4080/publications/uploads/forest_tenure_in_asia_2011_11_en.pdf
It s u lea hat effe t se i g do u e ts i this a is ha i g o isiti g sea h e gi es su h as Google a d Bi g. Do u e ts a e also ot i de ed fo full te t – i.e. the full text of the document is not currently indexed and made available via a search function; if it were, it would greatly increase the likelihood that relevant documents could be found by visitors to the site. The U‘L do u e t add esses itself does ot follo est p a ti es i eati g du a le li ks to resources available on the Web (i.e. via document handles, or digital object identifiers).
Migration to the new internal system is not complete with approximately 370 documents still hosted directly by the main RECOFTC website, and 190 documents available via the new document management database.
Also, while basic security measures have been put in place to protect RECOFTC servers, hosting these documents on internal infrastructure does increase the surface area exposed to malicious software and users, as well as potentially placing other systems at RECOFTC at risk.
It should also be noted that the new system was built during a period of limited financial resources at RECOFTC, and that the intention of building a unified document repository for all RECOFTC publications was a good one, albeit with the aforementioned shortcomings.
The ideal solution for the RECOFTC document repository is a unified system with a simplified classification and publishing process including advanced search and discovery features (browse by author, by subject, by document type etc., as well as full text search).
RECOFTC is considering two open source solutions for its public facing institutional document repository - DSpace http://dspace.org/ and Drupal 8 https://www.drupal.org/. DSpace is a free and open source institutional repository management system ideally suited for academic, non-profit, and commercial organizations building open digital repositories. Drupal 8 is a large and well-known open source content management system, with good support for taxonomic classification schemes, full text search (via plugins to search components such as Solr, and Elastic Search) and strong multilingual content support.
Either option should be considered by the Knowledge Management (KM) and Website Developer. The proposed solutions must follow repository best practices in terms of full text indexing, resource URIs (handles), discoverability in open repositories, and multilingual content support. The repository must be usto ized o the ed to at h i stitutio al spe ifi feature and branding requirements so that the transition by visitors from the main website to the document library is seamless, and does not interfere with the overall RECOFTC brand and online experience.
In terms of overall approach, in the first implementation phase, all documents will need to be published (re-housed) in a RECOFTC document repository (either using DSpace or Drupal 8), moving all publications from the existing database management system as well as the current Drupal 7 website. Communications and program related material including news and stories will still be published on the main RECOFTC site as required, with any references that promote repository publications provided via links – such as https://library.recoftc.org/<docreference>
RECOFTC Website
The current RECOFTC website is a Drupal 7 site. The site was created with the intention of migrating and re-desig i g the o e all the e f o a ea lie site. While the ig atio to Drupal 7 was completed successfully, the re-design was not. The site is now somewhat dated in appearance and no longer clearly represents the strategic communication and advocacy goals of RECOFTC.
Architecturally, and in terms of technical implementation, the site is complex with a large number of community contributed 3rd party module dependencies. Two vendors have since provided support to the site making various modifications, further increasing the complexity of the system.
sig ifi a tl i p o ed ai te a e a d futu e ig atio paths. A la ge u e of o u it -ased odules a e also o pa t of the o e D upal 8 i stallatio fu the edu i g o ple it of support and maintainability.
Knowledge Management (KM) and Website Developer will need to work on the website in pa allel to the I stitutio al Do u e t ‘eposito effo t des i ed a o e. With this
consultancy, the Center will begin the process of re-designing and re-implementing the main RECOFTC Website as a Drupal 8 site. As a first step, the Drupal 7 migration to Drupal 8 will be simplified by the initial migration of all publications to the new Institutional Document Repository, before attempting to migrate the remaining content items from the existing site.
E-Learning
RECOFTC has many years of experience and is well regarding for providing practical and valuable training on topics such as community forestry, gender equality in natural resource management, forest governance, land tenure, and conflict resolution.
The topics of e-learning and blended learning strategies have also been discussed internally at RECOFTC. An initial e-learning pilot project – funded by a sub-award received from the USAID-LEAF, was completed in September 2015. The project was based on the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) and was used to re-house and host the USAID-LEAF Climate Change Curriculum (CCC). The project also provided RECOFTC the opportunity to experiment with an online community forest course. RECOFTC received support and training for the initial Moodle installation –although to date, the s ste has ot ee full i teg ated ith ‘ECOFTC s training program or the main RECOFTC website.
There are broadly speaking two approaches that can be considered for the delivery of online learning material. One is the development of an adapted and interactive curriculum delivered via a full-featu ed lea i g a age e t s ste LMS , hile the othe is a dist i utio -fo used u i ulu deli e ed ia ore traditional Web content management systems (CMSs).
Interactive LMS platforms (such as Moodle
https://moodle.org/) are feature-rich learning environments that include instructional design components, course enrollment, class management, quizzes, assignments, forums, lesson completion tasks and more. However, to receive maximum value from an LMS, curriculum content needs to be adapted to exploit the instructional design components of the system (interactive lessons, dynamic content, quizzes, question banks, progression monitoring, as well as peer and instructor-led interactions). Such platforms typically have dedicated human
resources for course development and system administration, requiring additional operational support and training. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the success rate of LMS-based systems in smaller organizations is quite low, usually due to a lack of adequate human- and system-administrative resources needed to manage the platform.
A dist i utio -fo used st ateg e ui es less i est e t i te s of t ai i g a d u i ulu adaptation, and focuses instead on the distribution of well-organized and visually appealing content (with optional media components such as audio, video, or lecture recordings etc.) via a traditional CMS (such as Drupal https://www.drupal.org/ or WordPress
https://wordpress.org/).
Both platform approaches can be used to support blended learning strategies, where material available online is used to support workshop- and classroom-based instruction.
E-learning program strategy therefore depends on:
1. Longer-term strategic planning in terms of e-Learning and course delivery 2. Shorter-term operational requirements such as number of courses, frequency of
courses, estimated class sizes, enrollment requirements etc.
3. Available organizational resources and capacity including course designers for curriculum adaptation and course management.
4. Platform development support for future modifications, changes, updates etc. 5. System-level administration and hosting support.
RECOFTC is in the process of designing an e-learning strategy. Adopting a distribution-focused strategy, the components required to support curriculum creation and content upload must be kept in mind by the Knowledge Management (KM) and Website Developer during the main RECOFTC institutional repository and website efforts, with an implemented e-learning feature scheduled following the completion of the main website and institutional repository
