The Nova Scotia Digital Bridge Scholarship is a private-sector funded scholarship program that identifies students with a keen interest in ICT, and helps them explore this interest by subsidizing online classes for a period of 6 months. Students are paired with a mentor with a technical background to support their learning.

This program started as an idea in April 2014, and found the traction it needed to launch across the province for the 2014-5 school year. In partnership with Junior Achievement of Nova Scotia, we developed a website and web application to facilitate private-sector donations, program administration, student nominations and volunteer recruitment. We did this using Lasso 9 and CouchDB.

The Bridge Scholarship web application has been one of our most ambitious projects to date. The front-end features a fluid responsive design with multiple breakpoints, optimized for sharing across social media services, and with a consistent brand we developed from scratch. Three separate backends, built atop a CouchDB database, allow administrators, donors and mentors to access additional features. Donors can create company profile pages, and write greetings for the students they fund. Mentors can nominate students and report on their progress. Admins can access a full-featured content management suite, accounting and reporting functionality, and controls to facilitate administering the scholarship program.

We use Lasso 9 extensively in a number of workflows. It powers the drop-in Tumblr blog by integrating with the API to display multiple post types, filter by tags and map permalinks correctly. It powers the donation workflow, validating form data, verifying and charging the credit card, logging donor data, generating the tax receipt PDF, creating new accounts in the donor portal and emailing the donors their activation links. It powers the donor and mentor onboarding process, including sign-up, activation, authentication and password reset.

The entire website was written from scratch in just 5 weeks, by one Lasso developer and one front-end developer. Our entire Lasso codebase is just 220KB. As always, Lasso has lived up to its promise of speed, security and simplicity.

The Nova Scotia Digital Bridge Scholarship website is currently in pre-release status, being previewed by launch sponsors and public & private sector partners. Its public launch will actually coincide with the Lasso Developer Conference!

Feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we're confident that the Digital Bridge Scholarship will be well-recieved by a much wider audience of donors, mentors, students and stakeholders.

"Working with Torusoft has been an absolute pleasure! The team is intuitive and creative and understands market orientation and managing the expectations of multiple stakeholders. Torusoft produces top quality work quickly with exceptional features and functionality, which exceed expectations and help to advance goals and objectives. They have a collaborative and consultative approach, which is expertly coupled with a keen sensitivity to making it easy for the client."