The Project Badger Charter

1. a document, issued by a sovereign or state, outlining the conditions under which a corporation, colony, city, or other corporate body is organized, and defining its rights and privileges.
2. a document defining the formal organization of a corporate body; constitution: the Charter of the United Nations.
3. authorisation from a central or parent organization to establish a new branch, chapter, etc.

So that’s the definition of ‘charter’, but how do we define ourselves?

We are - Opportunity-led

We have the editorial and online skills, technical infrastructure and speed of execution to quickly create websites that meet customer demands.

We're not afraid to try and fail if we're confident that we remained true to the idea and delivered the best site possible in the timeframe.

We will be vigilant in scrutinising trends and opportunities in the online arena to make sure we are never caught by surprise by a sudden shift in the status quo.

We shall have - Speed of delivery - 8 week guarantee?

We will deliver a website fit for public use within eight weeks of approving the initial idea.

To achieve this target we will ruthlessly focus our time and effort on the things that deliver the key user benefits and will build an audience.

We will not over promise and we will avoid scope-creep.

Instead will reuse and improve features developed on previous sites - and when we refine them, roll them back so that everyone benefits.

We will create audiences - Scalable sites - with smooth handover to DI built-in

Our websites must be robust enough to grow quickly and continue delivering a good user experience even when demand spikes.

We must be ready to collect and present user-generated content and our infrastructure must not punish people for generating that content by slowing down or timing out.

The structure of our sites should enable a simple handover to Dennis Interactive and allow easy export into their databases and CMSes.

We will transfer sites to Dennis Interactive when the audience reaches 100,000 unique users or when it's been proved that a viable commercial site has been created with a smaller audience.

We need - Fluid demarcation lines

We are judged by the end result of what we do, not by who did it.

As a small team we should expect to fill in a variety of different roles.

As long as we have the skills to do this competently, this is a strength not a weakness.

If we don't have the skills to do something to our required standards we will leave well alone and find someone who can.

Training and skills development will be a vital part of our operation.

We will not have - Agencies

We can't afford - nor do we want on principle - to use agencies.

Applying our collective intelligence and problem solving-skills and the power of the internet should easily allow us to meet our needs.

We understand who or what works best with Project Badger far more than anyone in a suit and on a percentage.

We will create - Web-specific content

We will never shovel content created for one medium onto the Web without optimising it in some way.

This must be through the use of tools or other functionality that adds a layer of usability to that content that was not there before.

We will never use the web solely as a sales driver for an offline medium - we have to satisfy, engage, inform or entertain our readers at the place where they encounter us.

Our websites will be - Search friendly

All the sites we build will use structured and hierarchical HTML with a separate CSS presentation layer to ensure they are as searchable as possible.

We will also ensure we have optimised and editable meta data for every page on the site, including those that are developed outside the CMS templates.

We will avoid frames, image text, over-use of Flash, scripted navigation and other obstacles to search engine indexing.

We will structure the architecture of our sites to include relevant keywords into the directory names.

All our article URLs will be built from real words based on the headline.

All our sites will include a Google and Yahoo! sitemap as well a standard user sitemap linked to from the home page.

We will - Enable readers to respond, rate and contribute new content

When we publish content we see that as the beginning, not the end.

Our sites should encourage users to contribute their own editorial and opinions by giving them easy-to-use tools to do immediately.

We should not just give them the tools to comment but to rank and recommend our own and other readers' material.

Our editors will respond to user's feedback wherever possible and so lengthen the 'tail' of discussion and debate.

We will remove every obstacle possible that prevents readers from creating their own content, such as over-zealous moderation, approval or registration.

We will give users simple tools that allow them to recommend our pages to external peer review aggregators such as Fark, Digg, Deli.cio.us, Reddit etc.

Our websites will be - Standards compliant

Our goal is to achieve Level 1 compliance with the W3C Accessibility Guidlines for all our sites.

We understand that using third party CMS tools may hinder us in this objective but we will work with our technology partners to bring their systems into line within an agreed timeline.

In the meantime we will do everything we can to ensure that every part of our site and our applications is accessible and usable by all its users, whatever their physical abilities

Other rules include:

Creating a stimulating and interesting work environment and scrutinising all ideas fairly

"It's like having a start-up. We're trying to recreate some of the excitement and spontaneity that went into the web when it was all amateurs creating sites because they liked it, and trying to harness some of that and do it within a corporate environment. And obviously they think they can make money off it." Mat Toor – Project Badger Team Leader