December again. Time to look back at what twelve months of work actually produced. This was the year we went international, went deeper on health tech, survived another lockdown, and kept shipping through all of it.
What You Need to Know
- RIVER delivered across five major workstreams in 2021: UNESCO/SVSG, Edison Health, trev, Mental Health Foundation, and Oceania Football
- International expansion into the Pacific was the biggest strategic move of the year
- The Delta lockdown disrupted Q3 but didn't derail delivery
- Integration architecture became a recurring theme across every client engagement
UNESCO / SVSG Case Management
The most significant project of the year. Building a case management system for survivors of domestic violence in Samoa, in partnership with UNESCO and SVSG (Samoa Victim Support Group). This was new territory for us: international development, Pacific Island deployment, users working in crisis contexts.
We've written separately about the design challenges and the cultural competence required. What I'll say here is that this project changed how we think about software. Not incrementally, but fundamentally. Building for contexts where a bad UX decision has real consequences for vulnerable people raises the standard for everything else.
The system is offline-first, culturally appropriate, and built for the infrastructure reality of Samoa. It's not flashy. It doesn't need to be.
The UNESCO project reminded us why we do this work. But it matters that some of them do.
Rainui Teihotua
Chief Creative Officer
Edison Health
Edison Health entered its next phase this year. The platform has matured past the initial build into the harder work of integration, interoperability, and clinical workflow refinement. Health tech at this stage is less about new features and more about making existing features work within the complex reality of how healthcare organisations actually operate.
3
years of continuous development on Edison Health, now in its fourth major release cycle
Source: Internal
The health sector in New Zealand is going through structural change. The transition from DHBs to Health NZ (announced this year) will reshape how health technology procurement works. We're watching closely and positioning accordingly.
Trev
Our agriculture SaaS product continued to grow. Trev now has a stable user base of farmers and rural businesses across New Zealand who use it for day-to-day operations management. It's not a venture-scale SaaS play. It's a useful product for an underserved market, and it generates revenue while we learn about running a product business.
The interesting thing about trev is what it teaches us about building for non-technical users in contexts where "just Google it" isn't a helpful support strategy. Rural connectivity, practical design for people who are using the software between physical tasks, onboarding for users who might not be confident with technology. These constraints make us better builders.
Mental Health Foundation
Our work with the Mental Health Foundation continued to evolve. This is a long-term partnership that spans digital tools, content platforms, and internal systems. The Foundation does critical work in New Zealand, and supporting their digital capability feels meaningful in a year when mental health has been front and centre.
The Delta lockdown amplified demand for mental health resources. The Foundation's digital platforms saw significant traffic increases during August and September. Having built those platforms to handle scale meant they performed when it mattered.
Oceania Football Confederation
Supporting Oceania Football's digital infrastructure across the Pacific region. Sport governance technology is a niche we fell into rather than chose, but it aligns well with our experience in international development: distributed stakeholders, variable connectivity, multiple languages, diverse requirements.
The Year in Patterns
Looking across all five workstreams, some patterns emerge.
Integration was everywhere. Every client engagement this year involved connecting systems that needed to talk to each other. We wrote about integration architecture in March, and the topic only got more relevant as the year progressed.
Offline capability is becoming standard. Not just for Pacific deployment, but for any context where connectivity can't be guaranteed. We're building offline-first thinking into our architecture patterns, not as an add-on.
Health and wellbeing informed our practice. Working with health organisations, the Mental Health Foundation, and our own internal wellbeing focus created a through-line between what we build and how we work. That alignment matters.
The talent market got tight. We wrote about this in November. It affected hiring, it affected project timelines, and it's not going away.
Looking Forward
2022 is shaping up to be a year of consolidation and deepening. The UNESCO project continues. Edison Health evolves. Trev grows. The talent challenges remain. And the borders might finally reopen, which will change the market dynamics we've been operating within.
We're not making big predictions. We're making plans, and leaving room for the plans to change. That feels like the right approach after two years of unpredictability.