What We did
The initiative
What happens when a start-up tech company meets successful entrepreneurs who rode the dot.com bubble and succeeded at taking various web initiatives to market?
…enthusiasm, criticism, some measuring up, excitement and BAM.. a bunch of new opportunities materialize.
That's what happened on July 19th 2010 when Sentralize met the founders of Future Medium.
Background
Sentralize is a new web services company in Hobart, Tasmania that developed 'Content-2-Context'. It's a contextual filter for your choice of trusted online sources on specific topics. Think of it as an automated service that continuously searches select parts of the internet: business review sites, news channels, social media, etc to find out what's being said, not just from the mass media but from social media too. Content-2-Context lets you create a summary structure to share with users.
Future Medium offered to take Sentralize's technology, work out how to package it, and show it to the world. We wanted to showcase the Content-2-Context technology in a way that made a difference to everyone. We picked AFL Grand Final or the Federal Election as two ways and suggested Sentralize pick one.
The project
Enter iElect: a willing candidate so to speak…
iElect started in early 2010 for the Tasmanian State election and has now extended to the 2010 Federal election. Its creator, Stephen Reid developed the idea of iElect around collecting data from individual voters to create predictions of election results, plus also adding a complete election resource with news items, candidate & electorate guide and unique bloggers. The whole aim of iElect is to increase the engagement of the community in an unbiased environment.
iElect has attracted significant bloggers to provide a unique insight into the election process. Bloggers in the past have included Greg Barns, Paula Wriet, Tom Baxter and Andrew Scobie. The 2010 bloggers will be even more exciting and will be announced soon.
Future Medium took iElect from a State election platform to a nationally relevant design while integrating the Sentralize Content-2-Context news streams. Working on a compressed timeline, visual concepts, pitch, and production of creative material was completed in 24 hours. Another 24 hours later, Matthew Platts and Justin Cameron both students from the University of Tasmania, put their hands to provide some timely assistance and worked alongside Future Medium and Sentralize to integrate the project into the open source blogging and content management system Wordpress.
Less than 1 week after the idea was championed we'd collectively built and soft launched a content rich 2010 Federal election website to a welcoming public.
The result
Watch this space. Errr... well that space www.ielect.com.au
