With the aim of increasing the cultural wealth of North Rhine-Westphalia and raising the profile of the state in the competition between European regions, the state government created a visually powerful and service-oriented cultural portal "www.kulturkenner.de" in 2010. The platform was initially designed as a basic version and then continuously developed to meet new requirements in media use and to always be able to offer a contemporary user experience. The portal is designed as a responsive version for all available devices (including tablet, mobile).
The portal currently exists in a German and reduced English version. In the future, a linguistic extension of all content and functions by means of AI into all user languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, etc.) is planned.
The contractor shall coordinate the services of the partners, taking into account the client's ideas from a technical and organizational point of view.
We are looking for a contractor who provides the following services:
1. Weiterentwicklungskonzepte
Consulting and development of concepts for continuous technical and content-related development in close cooperation with the editorial team and the client. There are monthly status meetings with both offices in Düsseldorf. (Estimated workload: 4 person-days/month).
2. Concepts for optimising user numbers
Consulting and development of concepts to increase the number of users and the duration of use through the use of social media, new technical features, further development of recommendation mechanisms (sharing of content) as well as SEO and performance marketing measures. (Estimated workload: min. 6 person-days/month)
The following individual services are to be performed:
a) Weekly meetings with the editorial team to coordinate the strategy, possible new functions and content as well as the performance analysis of the current reactionary content.
b) Weekly coordination and advice on technical issues related to the portal and its social media activities, such as queries, bugs and new functional requirements in the content management system as well as technical assistance for editors in creating pages and entering content.
c) Monthly traffic analysis with the client.
All meetings take place in Dusseldorf.
3. Support fu?r
a) external institutions that enter data in the Kulturkenner (Tanzhaus NRW, LWL, etc.)
b) external partners who use their own technical connection to the culture connoisseur (API, i.e. interface for the automatic input and output of data, which is used, for example, by Tourismus NRW and the OWL portal) central project organization and project management
The following services are to be provided in accordance with section 1.3 a) and b):
Competent and service-oriented content and technical advice for partner access and technological issues in German, such as setting up accesses, changes to master data and passwords, handling of existing data on the part of the offering cultural institutions of various sizes; Observance of existing and possibly changing data protection regulations, also with regard to social networks.
Assistance with data entry, support with marketing measures and coordination of existing marketing partners with regard to the setting of images, texts, videos, taking over the size, format and text length adaptation to the technical and aesthetic requirements of the portal.
(Estimated workload: 5 person-days/month).
4. Technical takeover of the entire infrastructure, its interfaces, accesses and existing content.
The contractor takes over the entire status of the current programming, i.e. the existing application including frontend and administration area for editors and partners, all interfaces as well as all content from the content management system and access for editors and partners.
The portal is based on Ruby on Rails at its core. It is not a standard CMS, but a complete in-house development in Ruby on Rails with Angular JS, HTML5, CSS3, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases as well as hosting within a Linux environment.
The current version of this portal is to be transferred to the versions Ruby (from 3.2.Z) on Rails (from 7.0.Z) as part of the transfer from (Ruby 2.6.6 and Rails 5.1.7).
The application, source codes, databases including database structures and the editorial content and accesses including partner accesses are made available to the future contractor and can be used by the future contractor.
5. Continuous technical development of the portal:
This is a permanent position with monthly expenses. As before, the portal and its administration area are to be continuously developed in terms of functionality and appearance in order to do justice to changes in user behavior and feedback from partners and users. A monthly quota of 16 person-days is to be planned for further development.
The concepts for these further developments are developed in the monthly status meetings (see 1.1.).
Examples: Development of new functions, layout changes, adaptation of interfaces, extension of the administration areas based on the existing technology ( Ruby on Rails with Angular JS, HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux environment ) (for implementation see 1.4.)
6. Hosting & Technical Support
The Contractor provides the following hosting services:
Minimum requirements: Server (8GB Ram, 4x146GB Harddisc, 15,000 GB traffic, 100MBit/s connection), server management, firewall, monitoring of the server and the website, 24/7 hardware component replacement, daily backups of all files, assumption of all related costs including if necessary. License fees.
The contractor also provides the following technical support services in the context of hosting: backups, monitoring of the server and its services. Permanent provision of a contact person for advice on technical problems. Guaranteed availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week.