A schoolbag and a lamp

What does a schoolbag and a solar charged lamp, created and sold in South Africa, purposed to help children safely carry their schoolbooks and study without electricity at night, have to do with a team of fairly sun-deprived, hard-working web professionals in Berlin?

No, these people didn’t suddenly decide to go back to school, but they have been working hard for the best part of the past half year, trying to build the tools that will allow this project and many more similar efforts from social entrepreneurs realize their biggest potential.

This is Red Bull Amaphiko

Together with Red Bull, we embarked on a journey last year to create an ambitious platform where social entrepreneurs would be able to create their online presence and share information about their projects in a unique storytelling way. On the other side, people with a purpose of enabling such causes by sharing their skills and time are able to find these efforts and see their contribution move these projects one step further.
So, if you are a front end developer with some free time or a branding expert with a purpose, this is the place where you would be able to provide real impact.

We worked, as usual, in our typical agile way to iteratively build these features from scratch, instead of extending existing platform solutions, as this is the most effective way to set the correct foundations for the long-term goal. A goal that includes tons of new features such as building an online Knowledge Base of resources created, curated and discussed by the community – we hope that this will become the go-to place for aspiring social entrepreneurs. So this release is far from the final product, but only the start of the Red Bull Amaphiko journey.

Stay tuned for more blog posts from this project as Max will share invaluable information for all the front end developers out there who work in a Node.js environment and use React to build their front end framework. And although we swear on agile as a working framework, what we love most about it is that we can change it at will, so expect another blog post on how we bended the rules and threw the kanban board out of the window (not literally, surprisingly locals frown upon such actions).

And one last thing: We can’t stress how lucky we feel for the fact that the project has its own created typeface by Erik Spiekermann himself. The Amaphiko typeface (in lack of a commercial name) is an adapted version of Real and it’s something we can brag that even Apple doesn’t have :).

People who worked in this project:
Richard Bausek, Michael Börner, Niall Burkley, Andrea Franke, Christian Hanke, Maximilian Hoffmann, Spiros Martzoukos, Jonathan Muth, Christoph Rauscher, Eric Schaefer, Sharon Walsh, Paul Woods.