Scouts

Scouting is a global youth Movement that builds friendships, experiences, and skills for life, shaping young people's futures as active citizens. More than 500 million young people and adults have joined and experienced the power of Scouting's non-formal education since it was founded in 1907. Since then, the Scout Movement has continued to grow and is now active in 172 National Scout Organizations with over 57 million young people, supported by millions of dedicated volunteers, take part in Scouting activities and events worldwide. World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM) supports the growth and development of Scouting worldwide to enable more young people and volunteers to experience Scouting's life-changing educational offering.

We provide ongoing technical support for the existing WOSM services using CMS Drupal. Our activities include expanding and improving functionalities in response to the current needs of the institution.

In our cooperation, we maintained the www.scout.org site on Drupal 7, and after migrating to the current version of Drupal, we provided hosting for the old version for archival purposes. Currently, our work focuses on maintenance and development tasks for sdgs.scout.org, a service promoting the implementation of sustainable development goals among youth worldwide.

The SDG platform engages scout movement participants through gamification and promotion of projects and activities that support sustainable development goals. We have not only created dedicated pages for subprojects of the organization but also managed integration between various systems. Additionally, we provide stable hosting support, ensuring uninterrupted operation of the services.

Our specialists often had to work under significant time pressure since our clients' activities needed to be synchronized with global events (such as Jota-Joti – the largest digital Scout event), organizational marketing campaigns, and offline events worldwide. Additionally, considering the scale of the WOSM Jota Joti event, which annually gathers over 50,000 participants, it was our task to optimize scalability and functionality of the websites. This required a series of server modifications and proper configuration of Drupal's cache. We also routinely monitored and enhanced our clients' server configurations. Working with an older codebase required us to conduct an in-depth analysis of the existing source code before any actions were taken to fully understand its mechanisms.

In managing the archival versions of www.scout.org and members.scout.org, we had to prepare a hosting platform capable of storing a total of 2TB of data. Thanks to the flexibility of our hosting solution, we successfully met this challenge. Moreover, given that the archival services were based on an unsupported version of PHP (7.4), it was crucial to ensure the security and isolation of the platform based on outdated components.

We were able to provide several improvements to the existing UX of Jota Joti event and on top of that increase the amount of participants. Owing to our work, all the performance issues during the event were addressed promptly. What is more, due to our efforts, we were able to remove a lot of deprecated content from www.scout.org. When it comes to sdgs.scout.org, we were able to deliver several new features such as the new section of pages plus some improvements to the editorial workflow of content.