hungerbanquet.org

HungerBanquet.org launched in September, 2003.



HungerBanquet.org was an interactive educational site to give an online presence to Oxfam America's signature Fast for a World Harvest event, the Hunger Banquet.

In a real Oxfam Hunger Banquet, each person attending is randomly assigned a role in the high-, middle-, or low-income groups, and they receive food based on their role: a three-course meal for the rich, and rice and water for the poor. Like a real Hunger Banquet, HungerBanquet.org gave you a chance to learn about hunger from the point of view of those who experience it every day. The main feature of the site was a Choose Your Own Adventure-style activity in which users play the role of a person in a developing country, facing the choices involved in the daily struggle to find food and live a dignified life. I helped to conceive and build the site, defining the activity and editing the stories in addition to doing the technical development.

HungerBanquet.org has been used as an educational tool by teachers in several countries, and was named Site of the Day by USAToday.com. Though the site is no longer up in its original form, much of the content can still be seen on the Oxfam America website.

The site ran on PHP with a MySQL backend, using a flexible content management system I built myself. This system allowed non-technical users a simple interface for the complicated process of adding new stories to the activity.