AMIMA: a medical seminar taken off email and posters

The Medical Interns of Marrakesh Association is a Moroccan non-profit founded in 2000, representing more than 745 doctors across specialties in the Marrakesh region, working on interns' rights, patient care and professional development.

They had never had a website, and the work that needed one most was the annual seminar.

The problem was a workflow, not a page

Everything ran on email and paper. The call for papers went out as a printed poster and a round of emails. Speakers replied with their talk summaries as attachments, into somebody's inbox. Someone read them, decided the programme, and announced the final schedule the same way it had started — more posters, more emails.

None of that is unusual, and all of it breaks the same way. Submissions arrive in one person's mailbox, so only that person knows what has come in. A schedule announced on a poster is wrong the moment it changes. And nobody outside the room ever sees any of it.

What I built

One site carrying the whole cycle:

• The seminar announcement, published rather than printed.

• A submission form collecting speech proposals into one place, with an admin view of everything received.

• The final programme, published once and correct for everyone reading it.

• A news section for the association's other activities.

• Member polls, with the results surfaced on the homepage.

• An admin panel covering all of it — news, polls and submissions in one place.

The outcome was centralisation rather than novelty: one address where the association announced things, received things and published the result, in place of three habits held together by whoever happened to be copied in.

Two years later I built the members' side for the Moroccan Society of Cardiology, where the same starting point — a national membership run by hand — needed something different at the other end.

Built in PHP and MySQL in 2004. The site has since been replaced; what is described here is the version I delivered.