The Wageindicator Foundation deploys Plone for it's world-wide portals on wage information. Moreover, Plone serves as an application platform for most of the web based tools used to create questionnaires, salarychecks and other interactive content. The Wageindicator Foundation was started in 2000 in the Netherlands, and is now the hub of an international collaboration between universities, research institutes, trade unions and commercial parties. The goal of the foundation is to share and compare wage information, and so to contribute to a transparent labor market. The ideological stance of the foundation means that Open Source and free software is preferred. The separate sites collect over 400.000 visitors per month, served by four clusters of two machines each, hosted in the USA, India and the Netherlands. Techniques involved are HA-Clustering, load-balancing, caching, remote distribution of new releases for software.

1. Wageindicator Foundation: a Case Study
Huub Bouma
October 10, 2007

2. Introduction
• What is WageIndicator
• Organisation
• Questionnaire technique
• Web portals
• System architecture

3. What is WageIndicator
• Websites containing information about work and income
• Per country and per target
• Income questionnaire
• Salarycheck

4. Organisation
• WageIndicator Foundation
• goal: labor market transparency
mission statement:
”Share and compare wage information. Contribute to a
transparent labor market. Provide free, accurate wage data
through salary checks on national websites. Collect wage data
through web surveys.”

5. People involved
• scientific research
• datamanagement
• content
• management
• marketing
• technique

6. Techniques overview
• Salary Survey
• Questionnaire Management System (QMS) for constructing
the survey
• WageIndicator web sites

7. Survey technique
• engine (socrates) built with java
• GPL license
• modelled after the w3c XForms standard
• engine reads XML models

8. Questionnaire Management System
• surveys are constructed with the QMS web application
• only available for the survey designers
• plone application
• Custom i18n layer

9. Web sites
• Simple Archetypes based product
• Very simple, but flexible enough
• skinning for partners

10. Architecture
• HA architecture (2 production environments)
• Websites behind Apache and Squid
• Remote deployment (scp + quickinstaller)
• Content only managed on acceptance environment
• Synchronizing (from ACC to PRD)
• future: real Plone HA clustering, and load balancing

11. Statistics
• 37 plone portals
• 20 countries
• 10 servers: India(2), USA(4) en the Netherlands(4)
number of unique visitors for loonwijzer.nl
• last month: 404,772
• day peak: 100,000