Clearview

Submissions season for the producers and staff of animation's highest honor once involved sorting through over a thousand hand-mailed packages containing jewel-cased DVD's with submission forms and checks rubber-banded together. This veritable mountain of physical material was then shuffled through very extensive nomination, voting, and ceremony production processes by hand. Since joining the Annies team in 2010, Clearview has systematically brought each of these processes together in a single online platform.

Clearview Contributions:

• Fully web-based award consideration submissions process.
• Automated video verification, storage, and transcoding, utilizing Vimeo API integration for high-quality, secure and familiar playback for fair judging and voting.
• Secure judging portal with high-quality material and submission review, shortlist, issue flagging, and discussion features; nomination selection and studio notification.
• Voting management, including voter application and selection processes and secure voting portal.

At one time managed primarily through Excel spreadsheets and mail-in forms, the Hollywood chapter of the International Animated Film Society's membership system was functional but time-intensive for its administrators.

Seeing the benefit of an automated, online membership management system, ASIFA's Board of Directors wisely contracted Clearview to bring their member-related functions together into one web-based platform. More than a half-decade later, we're still working in close partnership with ASIFA to maintain and streamline member processes and relations through a secure, custom-built online portal.

Clearview Contributions:

• Purpose-built member dashboard with quick access to useful member functions including: online signup, membership upgrade, and renewal; info & address changes; member-only services and perks; automated password reset & forgotten login recovery; notification preferences.
• Powerful administrator dashboard, complete with tiered admin privileges, quick member lookup & sorting, bulk member management, numerous import/export options and detailed reports.
• Secure, multi-method payment processing with in-dashboard payment logs, receipts, and refund processing.
• Newsletter and notification management including automated synchronization with MailChimp newsletter and Mandrill transactional email platforms.
• Scheduled self-maintenance and member relations tasks including proactive address validation and expiration notifications

Merit is a groundbreaking verified identify platform, with the end goal of being the leader in truth between organizations and individuals across every industry.

When Clearview started working with Merit, we were hired to build a prototype -- proof of concept, essentially, for a product built on top of Merit's brand-new API. Part of the purpose was to bring more value to the Merit platform; the other part was to test that new API (in essence, to test Merit's thinking on the design of the API itself).

Since Clearview was in on the process very early, we were able to provide a lot of feedback on that newborn API. Instead of simply meeting the milestones, we were able to partner with Merit to answer some of the bigger questions: around how the API should work; how products could communicate with the platform; how to handle some of the trickier use cases.

Merit ended up rebuilding their API in direct response to the Clearview team's feedback. They replaced the original version with a harder/better/faster/stronger one, boasting a considerably more efficient data structure. Notably, they were able to rebuild before the first API had gone far enough to generate too many dependencies on the original structure.

This arrangement brilliantly suits the way we work. It gives us a granular view into what organizations' needs are; now-and-future use cases; what very-cool stuff could potentially be built on the platform. Not only do we have that information for ourselves -- knowing all that means that we'll be excellent support for third-party developers keen to build on the platform. All of this optimizes Merit's resources, magnifies their growth and nourishes the rapidly-growing scope of their platform and related products.

We went from a small contract (developing a web app) to a long-lasting, scaling partnership, with a team of around a dozen people on our side working alongside Merit on their suite of core and non-core products. 

We built the mighty little Merit Integrations App on Zapier, which allows Merit’s users to instantly connect Merit with 3,000+ apps -- and, by that, to create and automate workflows for sending, revoking and editing merits.

The objective was to enable zero-code integrations with hundreds of existing and popular platforms for organizations by building an integration with Zapier to cover core platform functions. To get there, we built a custom, transparent proxy bridging Merit’s custom authentication flow to Zapier Oauth2 and custom logging.

In order to make the integration available to all organizations -- in as streamlined a manner as possible -- we modified Zapier’s OAuth authentication method through custom code execution at specific stages. This allows for all these disparate organizations to be linked to a single Merit API App, all without sharing the app credentials. (Note: In order to most easily identify API Traffic originating from Zapier, apps are created in a template-ized fashion that allows data science to differentiate them from other API apps.)

We exclusively used the Node.js Javascript framework for development of the project, and it is validated, deployed and maintained through the Zapier Platform CLI. This allows for development teams to collaborate using version control and CI -- and build more advanced integrations with custom coding for every part of API calls and response parsing.