Local Democracy Reporting

www.rnz.co.nz/ldr

The Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) project is a free public interest news service focusing exclusively on stories about publicly appointed or elected officials or bodies in Aotearoa New Zealand, and is supported by RNZ.

I led a team of three developers to build a wireservice and content distribution portal for the service. We worked with an internal product owner to develop job stories, editorial workflows and make an appropriate CMS selection given the time and budget constraints.

Toolbox

We built the service with WordPress because we needed a flexible, easy-to-use administration interface to support the editorial approval workflow of regional newsrooms. I introduced a devops focus by choosing Heroku as the cloud platform for the service; and we rose to the challenge of turning a WordPress application into a 12-factored app.