Virtual Bridge Walk for Reconciliation Thursday, May 27, 2010

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Reconciliation Walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR) commissioned me to build a virtual bridge walk as part of their "Are We There Yet?" campaign.

The website is written in python and uses the django web framework. It has some features of which I am particularly proud. The avatar-building component provides over 30,000 different combinations. The puzzle page provides each user a unique image composed of over 350 different avatars. I use inkscape + PIL to composite avatars from about 30 base images. To avoid crushing browsers on low end computers, I used (abused?) image maps to create the puzzle. Overall the result is a very solid, easy-to-use project with solid features that had a fast turn around and low cost.

My own personal idea of the Reconciliation is that white and black Australia needs to agree on what happened in the past before we can move forward. Only by "reconciling" the two different views of history we seem to have in this country (settlement vs invasion) can we chart a way forward.