A central challenge to effective engagement in international development and social justice, whether by public, for-profit, non-profit, or multilateral actors, is maintaining the highest standards of transparency and accountability.  Transparency and accountability mechanisms are the ways that communities can take power over the health and well-being of their communities and work together with public and private organizations to make the most impact of the resources available.  Nyaya Health aims to produce timely, clear, honest, open-access internet-based content as one important mechanism of transparency and accountability.  We have described our innovation and vision in the biomedical journal PLoS Medicine.  

Overall Architecture of our Web Presence

Nyaya's web presence is largely a volunteer effort.  Our virtual volunteers work in solidarity with our on-site staff, community members, and patients to "bear witness" in a virtual sense.  They provide the virtual eyes, ears, mouthpieces, and megaphones to provide a global impact on our local work.  This bearing witness may take the form of web development, blog editing, or data analysis, but they all carry a singular purpose: to provide more open, transparent, data-driven, and effective healthcare in remote, impoverished, and marginalized areas.  We detail our volunteers management system elsewhere.   Contracts for individual volunteers should be linked to each of the particular web-based platforms. 

Nyaya Health's web presence is primarily defined by the following platforms: nyayahealth.org, wiki.nyayahealth.org, blog.nyayahealth.org, tumblr.nyayahealth.org, social media pages (facebook, twitter), and dropbox.  Each serve distinct functions, but all should be coordinated so that 1) content is maintained in an updated, dynamic, and engaging fashion; 2) efforts are not duplicated; 3) each location is accesible to those who need to read or edit the content; 4) each of these sites work synergistically together to maintain organizational objectives of efficiency, transparency, and collaboration.  

General Content Management Strategies and Principles

Web content should be driven by non-technical, field members to the extent possible.  The content itself should be easily accessible and honest.  Our goal is to make site, blog, wiki accessible for rapid updates from non-technical members rather than rely on expert programmers.  The main strategies are as follows:

• Using wordpress.org as our content managament system for our website.  This allows non-technical members to easily make text edits without requiring any software downloads nor particular expertise.  Editing is as easy as writing a blog post.  We catalogue more technical/stylistic changes here: WebsiteNotes
• Using the blog to drive dynamic homepage content.  This strategy allows us to maintain an up-to-date, engaging homepage without requiring any editing of the page itself.  Any member can post text and pictures that are then linked to our homepage.  We do this by using:
• feedburner to display the title and date of any blog posts labeled under the category "news"
• wowzio to provide a gallery of rotating pictures that are grabbed directly and linked to the blog

To ensure quality and overall consistency, we have a volunteer Blog Manager (Contracts_BlogManager) who approves and edits all blog posts. 

• Having an easily-editable action alert section on the main page
• Utilizing an open-access wiki on which all our members post protocols, data, and programmatic details. Our Communications Director is responsible for overseeing the quality and consistency of the wiki pages.
• Maintaining user manuals for tech management updated collaboration  
• We use dropbox for sharing of documents since it has easy online/offline/sync capability that works fast in Achham.  We are still devising ways to improve moving content from dropbox onto the wiki. 

Web Management Protocols

The following provides links to the key web management protocols available pertaining to our various information technologies.  

Listserves

Our Google Apps Google Directory lists all Nyaya listserves with details on number of members in each group and its access settings (Private, Restricted or Public). For details on these access setting categories please see the instructions under Creating a new Google Group.  You can also view the complete set of lists and their members in the NH E-Communications organizational chart.

Wiki

The wiki is the central repository of organizational documents, financial and clinical data.    See our Wiki Management Document for more details

Blogging and Micro-blogging 

These provide open-access forums for discussion and dissemination.  See our blogging guidelines and blog manager contract documents for further details.

Dropbox

Dropbox is our organizational file cabinet.  We try to maintain as much information available to the general public as privacy concerns allow.  

See our DropBox management page for further details.  

Website

The website is our main URL for promotion and dissemination.  See our WebsiteNotes technical page, as well as our director of technology contract. 

Team Member Efficiency

Please see our collaboration page for more details.

Social Media Management

A key component of our model is to engage a broader social movement in advancing the moral imperative of healthcare, transparency, and good governance within the public and private sectors.  Part of engaging a more global, broad-based audience is through the use of social networking platforms, detailed on our Social Media page.