DjangoCon '12 is on the East Coast this year, and we submitted a proposal to present on our recent intervention in South Africa. We hope to see you in DC!

Title: Offline and Off-Road: Django, Health and Human Rights

Description: For years, CCNMTL has been using Django to create interactive multimedia health interventions. We'll spotlight our latest NIMH-funded project where we deployed Django to offline netbooks at South African HIV clinics, and developed a sneakernet-based (ie USB drives) data synchronization protocol. We'll also present our FOSS CMS for authoring these ebook-like sites.

Abstract: For years, CCNMTL has been using Django to create interactive multimedia health interventions as a part of our Triangle initiative. We have worked closely with the Schools of Social Work and Public health to explore the possibilities and benefits of incorporating rich, interactive, multimedia into these kinds of counseling sessions.

In this talk we will spotlight Masivukeni, our latest NIMH-funded project where we deployed Django to offline netbooks at South African HIV clinics, and developed a sneakernet-based (ie USB drives) data synchronization protocol.

As we iterate over projects like these, we have continued to abstract the aspects of these projects that are idiosyncratic to this domain. We'll also present our open-source lightweigth-CMS that we have created for authoring these ebook-like sites. The characteristics of these sites are serial content delivery (often with specific business rules, such as preventing access to already-seen, or not-yet-seen pages), interspersed with casual learning "games" (eg html5/javascript drag and drop activities).

Finally, we will discuss the roadmap for this authoring tool, including the possibility of a networked, collaborative ebook authoring tool, that might export epub3 or SCORM-compliant sites.