Wiki-Based Website Design for ASDSO

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Providing Resources to Elevate Dam Safety

Client: Association of State Dam Safety Officials
Location: Nationwide

 
 

Challenge

The Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) is dedicated to improving dam safety throughout the U.S. To help achieve its mission of educating, improving regulatory support, and unifying the dam safety community, ASDSO wanted to establish a single source of dam safety industry best practices resources by developing a tool to serve as a central digital resource for all things dam safety, including:

  • Safety programs.

  • Emergency and risk management.

  • Design.

  • Operations.

  • Maintenance.

  • Assessment.

Wanting to enhance its existing member portal — accessed via its website — ASDSO's vision included the functionality of integration between website and member portal.

Solution

Leveraging our innovative foundation based on using technology to drive solutions, GeoDecisions collaborated with Gannett Fleming and ASDSO to create the ASDSO Dam Safety Toolbox. The Toolbox, a user-friendly, wiki-based website — allowing collaborative user editing — combines dam safety data, guidelines, and best practices for the dam safety industry. The Toolbox allows dam safety professionals to contribute resources directly to the tool, increasing the accessibility of information to the industry and removing constraints of members-only content.

ASDSO created a wiki website and identified the goals of the website, including:

  • Sharing a single resource of dam safety best practices industrywide.

  • Providing educational resources and training opportunities for dam safety professionals at all levels.

  • Becoming the authoritative source for dam design submittal and comment review.

  • Developing a platform for openly sharing guidelines, tools, regulations, and best practices.

GeoDecisions used web design principles common to wiki sites throughout the web development process. The Toolbox functions like other content management systems and wiki websites, with easy editing, expanding, adding, and interconnecting pages and reducing the amount of customer service needed for future website functionality.

We enhanced the design of the default MediaWiki-base website so that the Toolbox appears as a typical website to improve the user's experience and create a seamless transition between the ASDSO website and the Dam Safety Toolbox. We also upgraded the MediaWiki search capabilities with Elasticsearch to allow more flexibility in search queries and further enhance the user experience.

The real challenge was to develop a first-of-its-kind single sign-on (SSO) between the member portal and the Toolbox. The member portal is built on a platform different from industry standards and uses a unique authentication source. GeoDecisions successfully developed, coded, and implemented an SSO solution using MediaWiki plugins to override the default authentication and integrate with the member portal backend. The result is that once members are logged in to the member portal, they can access both the Dam Safety Toolbox and the member portal seamlessly.

Learn more about Gannett Fleming's role in the project. 

Key Technologies

  • MediaWiki

  • MediaWiki plugins

  • PHP/HTML/CSS

  • Impexium

  • Elasticsearch

Key Results

  • The Dam Safety Toolbox — an open-source tool to educate and support dam safety owners, regulators, managers, and consultants.

  • An easily accessible platform for sharing information, including blog posts, best practices, trainings, project examples, and guidelines. The Toolbox encourages industry participation, resulting in a unique customer support experience.

  • Early acceptance throughout the dam safety community of available resources and information, leveraging the easy organization, accessibility, and searchability features.