Links

Anishnabeg Outreach Nest

A Learning Management System for Indigenous people of Canada to achieve economic and social independence.

Overview

Anishnabeg Outreach (AO) is a non-profit organization that provides Indigenous people of Canada culturally appropriate services to support them in overcoming social barriers and achieving independence.

The executive leadership and management team at AO has a clear vision that a strong digital presence is needed to support the organization in achieving its goals as broadly and quickly as possible. Through this vision AO Nest was born, a Software-as-a-Service platform that acts as a central hub for driving positive change to Indigenous people.

The AO Nest has a bold scope and is already well underway thanks to a great collaboration and an incredibly talented team. One day the hope is that the platform will bring together diverse functions to deliver an integrated experience for learning management, contact management, mentorship management and even a portal for Indigenous artists and crafters to share what they have learned and created through an online marketplace.

Technology

We jointly ran this project as an experimental minimum-viable-product so that we could gather feedback from a unique and diverse community as quickly as possible. We successfully delivered the first working version of the learning management system in one month and then proceeded to iterate quickly over the following 3 months.

The application uses Ruby on Rails as it allowed us to not only provide great features very quickly, but it also allowed us to iterate and pivot quickly. As with most experiments, the current version of the software resembles a very small percentage of the original release.

As with all projects at Harled, we ensure developer experience (DX) is the top priority as it removes all friction in mission-driven individuals contributing meaningful features. Visual Studio Code and Docker from the core development environment with an automated test suite based on Rails' native minitest framework.

Since inception, we have pushed code hundreds of times while maintaining an Elite DORA performance.

Ruby on Rails

PostgreSQL

Bootstrap 5

Docker

Dokku

Digital Ocean

Gratitude

We are incredibly grateful for all of the incredible individuals working at Anishnabeg Outreach for the opportunity to collaborate and explore an Indigenous-centric approach to curating content and enabling learning.

From the moment we first met the team, we were inspired and excited to play a small role in the very large vision held by the organization. Over the past year we have successfully collaborated to not only build great software but also to drive an understanding of AO's mission through our company and our networks.

We are proud of the work we have started, and excited to see where Anishnabeg Outreach is able to take it in the months and years to come.

Current Projects