Readers of ON understand full well the importance of information in all its forms and formats. Further, they know that the value of information is directly proportional to its levels of accuracy and accessibility. Given that, let's talk about disease.

No disease has been more significantly marked by both misinformation and lack of information than HIV/AIDS. This knowledge gulf has significantly hampered efforts to stem the spread of this disease, which has led to the deaths of 25 million people worldwide in the last 25 years—more than half a million in the U.S. alone.

The Well Project, Inc., a nonprofit organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, was founded to change the course of the HIV/AIDS pandemic through a unique focus on the informational needs of women. The organization's website serves as both a repository of current, accurate information about the disease and an online community of women seeking answers, advice, and support.

"Though we're a small nonprofit, we have big goals that require a robust information infrastructure," says Richard Averitt, co-founder of The Well Project. "At the outset, we planned for what we would need should we be successful, rather than starting small and having to retool later. We took a gamble and built the 'future model' in the beginning. Our current growth and reach has justified that decision."

Global reach, global responsibility

The Well Project's site launched in 2003 and within a year it was learned that 30 percent of its users were outside the U.S. Yet the site's content was in English and in many cases was specific to the American healthcare environment.

"A lot of countries—such as Ghana and South Africa—don't have a lot of reliable information sources, nor do they have a healthcare system as sophisticated as ours, especially about HIV/AIDS," says Averitt. "We felt we had a responsibility to publish our content in multiple languages, and we also saw an opportunity to allow localized content to be posted to our site. But this would require a major evolution of our information infrastructure."

The Well Project's globalization effort began with a moderate challenge: launching a Spanish site that could be updated in real time. With a staff of only four, Averitt needed an automated solution that made use of external partners and parties. He oversaw the development and deployment of an interactive content management (ICM) system that would allow the infrastructure to expand to meet future needs, including localized content creation, management, and hosting services.

For the Spanish site, which serves as the model, the solution works like this. New content, created in English and formatted in XML, goes into a queue. From there, it goes in two directions. In one, the English text proceeds on its normal workflow process to get published. In the other, it gets routed to trusted translators who return the translated content to the publishing queue. A third-party reviewer always sees the translation on a staging site before it gets published. The two versions retain a parent/child relationship, so when one is changed, an automatic trigger begins the process for changing the other. Essentially, a mirror-published site is created.

Focusing on the size of the problem, not of the organization

"Now that we've proven that the system works, we're opening up the tool to the international community," says Averitt. "So we can go to France or Vietnam, for example, and have local translators plug into our system—not only to translate our existing content, but also to create and post localized content that could be translated back into English and other languages through the ICM."

The power of the solution—enabling The Well Project to manage translations for global communities as well as offer a mechanism for local communities to create new content—is driven by the sophisticated information infrastructure. Too sophisticated for a nonprofit? It all depends on the organization's mission and goals.

"We measure our ROI in numbers of lives saved," says Averitt. "The counter on our website is in the neighborhood of nine million. That's nine million women who have been infected with HIV since we launched our Web portal in 2003. And unless something changes, a lot of them are going to die of this disease. Information is one way to slow the increase of those numbers, and that's the role we've taken on. Whatever enables us to provide information to the greatest number of people is mission-critical, and that's why we've invested so much in our information infrastructure."