The Purple Sage Project is a joint initiative between six leading Victorian organisations, including the Victorian Women's Trust.

It was formed in 1998 in response to a shared recognition that many Victorians were deeply troubled about their State and its future, but felt powerless to effect any change. The collective effort - the Purple Sage Project - provided a voice for this community concern, and an avenue for developing strategies to do something about it.

Consonant became involved when it offered its services to update the existing Web site. Subsequent analysis of the site showed that it lacked the facilities to support the organisation's business objectives.

This project involves re-engineering the Purple Sage website to offer the functionality needed to meet its objectives, eg. discussion groups, which will enable and encourage discussion between dispersed geographic areas to build an online community and foster community within the individual centres.

While it is not a difficult task in itself, the fact that the team consists only of four people, all of which are part-time and two of whom are volunteers, this does present greater problems and require Consonant to shoulder more of the workload than it would otherwise carry in such a consultancy.

Despite the increased workload, Consonant is enjoying working with on this project due to the Purple Sagers being a wonderful team of people, who are really appreciative of our efforts (which is not expected but nice anyway).

Tasks include:
- assisting the Purple Sage Project to determine their business objectives,
- identifying functionality and content needed to support these business objectives,
- reviewing the existing site and team skills,
- analysing any gap between what's currently there and what's required
- preparing a plan for how to make up this gap,
- reviewing material to identify additional content and site structure,
- re-building the site so that it doesn't use frames, and that it is in a state ready for ongoing maintenance,
- sourcing the tools required for the Purple Sage project to maintain their own site,
- training staff in these products and the principles of website creation and maintenance, and
- helping Purple Sage to develop a site maintenance strategy, addressing issues such as relative responsibilities, frequency of updating, archiving, what can be automated, managing email, etc.