Consultant for Developing Practitioners’ Roster on Asian Preparedness Partnership (APP) Portal

Organization:

ADPC with support from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) launched the Asian Preparedness Partnership (APP) under the auspice of “Strengthening Capacity of Government and Local Humanitarian Organizations on Preparedness for Response in Asia” program to improve preparedness and humanitarian response to disasters in Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka by strengthening the interface and partnership between Government and Local humanitarian organizations and enhancing capacities through partnerships, knowledge resources, training, and networking opportunities.

The ‘One Stop Knowledge Hub’ of APP (https://app.adpc.net/) was established to enhance humanitarian information and knowledge exchange on disaster preparedness and emergency response in the region and beyond. This portal will disseminate best practices and lessons learned, emphasizing South‐South learning and knowledge exchange initially from the six program countries but also encouraging participation from the other countries in the region and beyond. This platform hosts a range of features from e‐learning courses, news and event content, factsheets, videos and infographics. APP with support from member countries would be involved in continuous updating of activities on the portal throughout the program duration and beyond. The APP portal has been developed on Drupal CMS platform.

Purpose and Outline of Assignment

One of the key activities identified under APP portal is to create an online pool of local experts (Practitioners’ Roster) to facilitate identification of qualified experts within program countries in South and South‐East Asia region to support activities being implemented in national platforms under APP. Initially, the roster would consist of a database of experts/practitioners from which countries could identify, select and meet their requirement on the APP platform. Key features of the roster would include:

An online, interactive interface on the APP portal to search and filter experts, view their profile, area of expertise, knowledge resources, publications which is accessible for different country requirements.
Creation of User Profiles: The profile of candidates would be created in a standard template of essential qualifications, work experience, competency pertaining to different sectors/themes.
Country Focal Points to broadcast roster webpage link to all established networks for joining the roster. Invitations can be sent via email and provide a link to the entry point web page through which experts will input their profiles.
Submission: Each expert uploads required information in the format. National focal points review the submissions for consistency. After their approval, submissions to be sent for further endorsement to APP Regional Secretariat through standard email templates. After Regional Secretariat’s consent, login details and profile for the expert can be created.
Creation of individual profile pages in a standardized format and login‐ids of users for content updation.
Search functionality: Search engine on home page for finding experts through country, area of expertise, years of work experience etc. Content should be optimized to increase visibility in search engine results.
Linkage: Notification link to social media networks of APP when experts upload news/ update information.
Analytics: Creation of Analytics page for tracking expert usage, number of documents uploaded, pages referred etc.
Create active/inactive tab for experts according to their participation, availability, updates on profiles etc.
Creation of a moderated discussion forum between experts for sharing regular updates and knowledge products.
The profiles of experts will be created, uploaded, managed by the experts themselves and will be moderated by APP secretariat. Permissions will be configured to allow some users with higher and other users with lesser administrative and content‐editing rights
Mobile responsive design to open the roster/publications in all device screen sizes.
Provide program tracking, training and documentation in the administration and user of the website:

The vendor will make the prototype of the interface under development visible to the client, to allow feedback and guidance and corrections to content or function.
The vendor will maintain daily contact with the client's program managers about the progress of development, to communicate needed inputs or feedback, to receive guidance or improvements to existing development version, etc.
The vendor will be in daily communication with the client to provide briefing on progress, inputs, needed feedback, etc.
Upon completion of development, the vendor will provide a live training in the use and administration of the interface developed.
Upon completion, the vendor will provide written documentation, specifying (1) the basic steps and procedures to administer and maintain the interface for use by any future vendor that may need to work on the site, including the versions of the application platform and needed modules or additional software, identification of the locations of customized code, etc. In addition to the creation and development of the database of experts, the consultancy activities would also include interface modifications in the existing APP portal pertaining to creation of new pages, building new content, possible revisions in existing content/interface as and when required during the consultancy period.

Supervision

The Consultant will work under the overall guidance and report to Ms. Shalini Kanwar, Regional Project Manager and Ms. Shivani Gupta, South‐South Learning and Research Coordinator, ADPC.

Period of Engagement

The consultancy period will be for 90 days from the day of signing the contract preferably from 15 July 2018 spread over four months.
Free maintenance and support for three months from the date of completion of project.
This is an output‐based consultancy.

Deliverables

Development, graphic design, and layout on the portal as specified above and within the timeline detailed above - Detailed written document for basic steps and procedures to administer and maintain the roster

Required documents

Please refer the above terms of reference and submit the following:

Updated CV/Resume of consultant/firm
Draft concept, approach and plan/mock‐up of the interface on the portal based on the above specifications
Hyperlinks to examples of prior work completed of similar scope and features
1‐2 references who can attest to the provided examples of prior work
A proposed budget for this service

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