The Client

GamesTown is an initiative started by the Province of British Columbia that gives communities throughout the province an opportunity to showcase their Olympic and healthy-living spirit. As a competition segregated by community population, the public can then vote for the communities they feel are worthy of the GamesTown 2010 title and a $100,000 gold medal prize.

The Challenge

The province needed to create an online community website with powerful Web 2.0 functionality. Individuals from every community in British Columbia would need to be able to post their comments, stories, photos, and videos to their Community Profile and show why their community should win the title of GamesTown 2010. A public voting system would also need to be put in place with search and mapping functionality that separated the competing communities into the five population categories: small, medium, large, very large, and metro. Furthermore, as part of the healthy living initiative, the project also required that the maps, events calendar, and other content be shared and synchronized with the ActNow BC website.

The Solution

Backbone configured a single instance of Expression to manage both the GamesTown and the ActNow BC domains, allowing information to be shared via a single, consolidated interface. In addition, Backbone's developers used a combination of Google Map data and some clever Flash programming to create a highly interactive and searchable module showing the communities and their profiles in geographic context. This map module, the events calendar, and the Healthy Living Pledge database were available to be used in multiple instances on either site courtesy of Expression's ability to manage multiple domains.

The Result

Community participation on the site was instant and unprecedented. With external users contributing actively through the website's front-end and GamesTown staff constantly adding new content through the administrative back-end, the site is constantly growing. The combination of fresh content, interactive map-based community profiles, and a competitive atmosphere keeps users coming back for more. Also, the ability to share information between the ActNow BC website and the GamesTown 2010 site was a huge time and money saver for the Ministry: maintenance, updates, and content management duties were practically cut in half. Overall, the site is widely viewed as a total success.