Writers

As I mentioned last week, we're looking for writers.
We need people within Glasgow to excite others about the possibilities of reuse in their community.
We want some stand out individuals who can voice strong opinions on the current opportunities (or lack of) in Glasgow.
We're not interested in just shouting about it like lunatic eco warriors, thats not what we're about. Dear green place wants the attention of some conscientious people who would like to contribute to making a difference.

If you would like to write for deargreenplace.org please get in contact with us via info@deargreenplace.org
We'd like to soon have a short series of articles on the subject of "Recycling & reuse in Glasgow" how you interpret that would be up to yourself.
Outside of this blog, adverts have been locally circulated with the community recycling forum and will soon be passed around via Glasgow's "Lighthouse" art venue.

New Navigation

Now that we have dwindled down the categories to the bare essentials we're looking to beef them up (sorry veggies). But how are we going to accommodate all this info?
Our map navigation can be seen at http://dev.deargreenplace.org

The idea here is that you are switching your search context via the navigation as opposed to a form.
The benefits of this are that the user is presented with less superfulous information and has less form boxes to change on a new search.
One worry is that this will not be clear enough and confuse people as to what is being displayed.
There is a lot of information to be both displayed or hidden and we want to get the balance just right.
I've looked to take our inspiration from other sites like Digg who process a lot of information hourly. Looking at the differences between the two(http://www.digg.com/)
we can see that there is a visual indicator of what the bottom categories are on the front page.

After selecting any one of the categories it seems enough to just highlight the chosen category. I believe this is because once a user has chose a category it is taken for granted that this user now understands the relevance of the newly presented sub categories.
After the this there is colouring and a little separator which communicates the heading and links. This orginsiation of information is something that we can learn from and I'll work to see how the nav can change in order to make finding eco resources in Glasgow super duper easy!

New categories

So now we're thinking to move into food and events and Food What are we going to keep info about on these categories though?
Food: organic, farmers markets, local produce
An event: Name,location,time&date,tags,desc,pictures,ticket price,related events,contact,recurring

Where are you Juan?

Where are you Juan? We've started with the videos and we need our camera Juan.

It went like this:

Periodicals

Blogging the weekly meetings is one thing but we need regular, engaging content. Dear green place wishes to be taken seriously as a major force for pushing green issues to the fore front of Glasgow public awareness so we're going to need the kind of people that can start those fires in peoples hearts. Enlisting the help of writers will be a huge but greatly rewarding task. We need not necessarily only commission new work as there is plenty of pertaining content already available, we could also secure the rights to reprint certain articles with the kind permissions of the owner. There will be a whole host of ways to capture the interest of writers and as always we're open to ideas. Until we do secure the regular writers it's important to make our best efforts in generating this content to the best of our abilities.

Vodcasts

Video blogging (vodcasts) is relatively new in the whole scheme of web trends and has only recently been possible with widespread broadband web connections. Brandon took the initiative last week and set himself up in the first glasgow green map interview (You can see it here). We'd like to carry on this trend by getting our 'in housecamera Juan' to start making his way through a series of interviews with each of the green map volunteers to get their angles on to the phenomenon of green mapping and of course deargreenplace.org. A great bonus would be if we could enlist the time of an impartial third party journalist for the task.

Analytics

We were suprised to find there hadn't been as many visits as we'd hoped. Only 118 unique visits to the actual map as of the time of writing! At first this was a little disconcerting but really this highlights quite an exciting prospect. After a little reflection it makes a lot of sense that we're not receiving these visits, the majority of our visits came directly from google from people searching for words like 'recycling', 'second hand shops' and of course 'Glasgow'. The very reason that there is a need for deargreenplace.org is because there are not enough everyday Glaswegians talking and taking to heart environmental issues so we can't very well expect them to be searching for it ahead of Brittany Spears on google. That will be one more visit since I just mentioned her.

Every week we're in the eye of a quietly gathering storm but the storm in all its immensity has still to hit Glasgow's collective consciousness after nearly 8 months work. When it finally does hit, thats when we've begun to achieve our original goals.

Glasgow Green Events

We'll soon be implementing our events syndication area of deargreenplace.org where events of all the known Glasgow orginisations will be advertised. We'd very much appreciate if peeps could start getting in the habit of notifying us about any events well beforehand so we can do our best to advertise it to as many interested parties as possible.

New Design bits

We whittled down some of the categories, spoke about the forth coming design changes. In other news, Franki is currently troubled by a ghostly disc. No matter though, she taken an oodle load of shop pics which Kevin snatched to upload on to the internets.

Press release

The current press release describes our aims well but has no mention of the online map. We going to have to become more press and community facing if we wish to gain more public support and so we'll need to assemble a more comprehensive press pack complete with pictures names numbers and addresses, both physical and online. We changed a few things and then I said I'd add it to our Planner for future amendment.

Govan Green Space

Hannah will repping the green map this Saturday in at the Govan green space event in (a park). You'll be able to find her and maybe Frankie there in a little yellow hut. So go and say hi!

In ELDER PARK, GOVAN FROM 12 - 4PM ON SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 8TH.
Only 10min walk from Govan underground, just through the Clyde tunnel from Partick!

Marketing

We want to get out there! Up and coming we have the joy that is Glasgow's legendary... freshers week. We should do our best to promote ourselves very openly to those who will most likely be the beneficiaries and biggest supporters of second hand shops in Glasgow for the next years! Just targeting the big three should be enough, Glasgow uni, Starhclyde and the Arty School. Also we have an open day coming up for the ekectron club coming up in October. It would be a really nice opportunity to mingle with all our fellow club mates and do our bit in repping the Electron club. Additionally, we could take advantage of the situation to garner a little public feed back and usability testing.

For the life of me I can't remember the tasks. But for those who got them, I'll add them to the planner.
Go, go you gosh darned green guys.

IN ELDER PARK, GOVAN FROM 12 - 4PM ON SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 8TH.
ONLY TEN MINS WALK FROM GOVAN UNDERGORUND, JUST THROUGH THE CLDE TUNNEL FROM PARTICK!

LOTS TO FIND OUT ABOUT - REUSE, RECYCLING - MAKING JEWELLERY FROM RECYCLED STUFF, GLASS PAINTING, PLANT A DAFFY BULB IN A POT FOR THE SPRING - FIND OUT ABOUT ECO PAINTS! A FREE SHOP - COME AND SEE WHAT YOU CAN FIND( FOR FREE), GLASGOW WOOD RECYCLING PROJECT, INFO ON COMPOSTING, SPRUCE CARPETS, STARTER PACKS GLASGOW - THE SUNNY GOVA RADIO ROADSHOW! LUV TEXTILE RECYCLING CRFAT GROUP - GLAGAEL AND THEIR SUSTAINABLE TRADITOINAL CRAFTS, BULLWOOD WOODTURNERS
THE CRE8 BUS, C SPACE, GREATER GOVAN ENVIRONMENT TRUST , GREENPEACE, SWAG, FREINDS OF THE EARTH!
TELL US WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT CLYDESIDE DEVELOPMENT

look at myspace/govan greenzone

SEE YOU THERE! THIS IS A COMMUNITY LED EVENT, PLEASE SHOW YOUR SUPPORT!

Ok this is a bit of brain dump because I want to get some stuff done for the map. So daddadaddaaa heeeeres last week..

Hannah had been working like an industrial weave machine at the turn of the 20th century, so she was feeling fairly knackered.
Regardless, she had pushed on with a killer submission to this years "Eco-Prize" which we should quite rightly win, if only for having the prettiest collection of eco-friendly faces.

Our newest recruit Beth pointed out the rather daunting fact that so far there is no mention of recycling no the map!

We discussed potential problems following the actual release of the map. Now that the map is released how are we going to make sure that reuse facilities and retailers are pushing it to their full benefit? how can we engage them into continued discussions?
How can we incent them to help us help them?


Hey Beth!

Brendan, bless his soul was eager to excite us all to jump into the food game. It is indeed an excellent idea to start getting some sort of organic/vegan restaurant icons on the map, but right now? Maybe we should start getting the model in order by which to collect that data and have a good think about how we can successfully build and maintain it as a relevant a resource.
We have to go away and have a think about how we can get that data. Who is already collecting that data? How can we incent organic restaurants/suppliers to provide us with that data?
How will we decide on what qualifies as a organic retailer/supplier? A good idea was that of having a percentage based system where we could deduce an organic retailer by the ratio by which they sold organic food.


Here are Joe and Gerry, posing in their best 'programmer think' pose.

Then peeps started contributing into the mix where we could find some of this data, suggesting that it may just be an effort to collect and collate.
Hannah suggested Green city. Beth suggested about Hugh Fearnley whittingstall who reputably is a Chef with lists of suppliers in the back of his books?
Post a list of orginisations for food.

We discussed the idea of the green map as a hub for all eco activity in Glasgow, and that it may just to be organic in its growth like it has been so far as the green map so far is not comprehensive enough to demand such a title. A good initial move towars that area would be to get an event RSS feed onto the site in the guise of "Green Events in Glasgow"
It would be nice to get to a position where we could start educating people a little in recycling, not that they don't know but just help the effort to push it to the forefront.

Joe exclaimed - "We need some media on the front page!, Media, whats all this writing?!!! No more writing, pictures."
To which Brendan and myself jumped up and said we would indeed project our greenest mappest feelings on to the web.


EVERYONE - Boil down sub categories
FRANKI - Add photos to usb
KEVIN - write page for auto dev build page
KEVIN - refactor button down to one
JOE - implement A-Z
CHRIS - Address parser
Hannah - Overview of categories
JOE - Implement Glasgow green events
BRENDAN - review categories and add movie
KEVIN - Add gerry to set up planner,repo,xplanner
GERRRY - add linux set up guide.
GERRY - setup localhost
KEVIN - add rake to docs
KEVIN - vishar to xplanner
VISHAR - data extractor for excel
KEVIN - Add Beth, James & Gerry to planner