SilverStripe

TUANZ Innovation Awards 2008

Posted by Sigurd on 29 August 2008

Each year, the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ) runs a prestigious awards ceremony to recognise outstanding innovation in technology.

Winners and finalists were congratulated at an event last night at the Auckland Museum Dome. SilverStripe was associated with two categories.

Finalist in Healthcare Category

One in seven young New Zealanders are severely depressed each year, leading to suicide being their second most common cause of death, after motor vehicle accidents. As part of the Ministry of Health's National Depression Initiative, SilverStripe worked with some leading companies to produce thelowdown.co.nz, launched late 2007.

The website offers inspirational and honest videos about depression as delivered by New Zealand teen role-models, a large resource of written material, and contains an interactive chat room. The chat room provides a private and free online counseling service run by trained professonals.

The website is offered as both a very rich and innovative multimedia/Flash website and a bare-bones HTML site for dial-up users. The SilverStripe CMS powers both sites, with content automatically shared across them.

Since launch, the website has had over a million page views and hundreds of thousands of video views. Most importantly, on a regular basis, the counselors on the site observe an imminant risk of a young person about to take their life, and have intervened by calling emergency services. 

TUANZ recognised this work by naming it as one of three finalists in the Innovation in Healthcare category; a very humbling result.

Geoff Munn Wins Government Category

Over several recent years, SilverStripe employee Geoff Munn single-handedly created an E-Govt Validator, an automatic tool to check websites against the New Zealand Government Web Standards and Recomendations.

It identifies compliance and warnings to enable people with disabilities equal access to government websites. It is open source, and can be used (and downloaded) for free at www.accessware.co.nz.

We congratulate Geoff on his hard work and for winning the prestigious TUANZ Innovation Award in the Local and Central Government Services category!

Highlights of the night

Sigurd Magnusson and Geoff Munn attended the evening, with Kim Hill as MC.

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