Showing posts with label meetings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meetings. Show all posts
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.
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!
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? We've started with the videos and we need our camera Juan.
It went like this:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
A beautifully inky smelling, brand spanking new Glasgow green map has now been published and is circling it's way around Glasgow's most exclusive second hand shops!
I hear you cry. You can email us for one at info@deargreenplace.org or you can pick it up from one of the second hand shops on the map. You'll soon also be able to download it here and from the main site.
Well done everyone!
Oh but we've only just begun. Now that we have one notch in our belt we are beginning to turn our attentions to a web based green map that will be constantly updated by you!
Agenda
1. News / What peeps did since last meeting
2. Coo over map.
3. Review most important functionality of online map.
4. Plan of distribution.
5. Online monitoring
6. Testing: Franki / Hannah
7. Dev: Kevin and joe change add place
8. Tasks!
We mostly justed cooed and had a think about where our efforts should be focused. We reviewed what we wanted first from the web site and found that first and foremost we need to get it to collect information based on the impact of the paper based map. A form to enable peeps to give feed back. Also its important for us to have it available in a downloadable form as soon as possible. Franki offered to break up her fantastical design into small palatable fantastical areas, each on a seperate A4 page(since most grans don't pack an A1 printer beside the biscuits).
The most important priorites for the web map are:
1. Feedback and distribution of the download map
2. Add categories of Environmental Proj & Reuse Proj
3. Content from the map for web
Usability testing was carried out by Fanki and Hannah to find that the user could carry out the tasks quickly and instinctively found the areas of the map needed, even with it broken. This user was the news browsing type and had a bit of experience with google maps and so knew how to use all the controls straight away. Notably she enjoyed the experience of adding an icon to the map and found it easy to click the next arrows during the process.
Points taken from testing:
Add place functionality has improved
Messages to help when adding a shop but could be revised.
User used home as point of reference
The area selection was the next stop after the map.
Add stats to pages
Get Franki disk
Get Kevin illustrator
Make online form
fix zooming in again
Divide up map for web
Make a synchroniser for the spreadsheet and web DB
Wow, thats nine meetings now. This week we spoke about the final slap dash to get the paper based map ready to go. Now that we have all the data fitting it on to the map is actually proving to be difficult! Franki also unveiled some of her working ideas for the identity of the map which sadly weren't all working at the meeting but fear not! I've plonked them about here for everyone to glaze over.
Like the last meeting, ideas of how the site would look was a focus. Timeless, contemporary or current fashion? Either way we'll of course be sure to design it elegantly. I tend to lean towards current fashion. There are definitely some very different mixed ideas about how the map will look and it will be great to have everyones ideas developing slowly out loud in opinions and on paper. Franki has been slowly working with Scratch design to emphasise the idea of finding both small hidden treasures and valuable items in charity shops. I think its starting to come across really well and shows a clearer purpose for the green map.
Honestly these are great Franki, its a shame we couldn't have chatted more about these images.
People keep coming up with very idilic communityesque ideas where in an environment with changing weather people are doing things in the background like riding bikes and carrying tables. Sounds nice to me. I'll post up some of my mocks soon as well and maybe we can put up others thumbnails if we get them scanned in.
Everyone has 2 tasks this week:
Little thumbnails of what a Glasgow Green Map web site could look like.
Lists of links that could be in the navigation of the glasgow green map site.
Good luck everyone!
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Writers for a greener place and Camera Juan
Posted by Kevin McDonagh Monday, 17 September 2007- 8:18 amWriters
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.
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
Continuing to find out how our map fares up against the real world we had the help of some reuse organizationally related peeps. They turned up specially to help us with a bit of usability testing. All our regular volunteers now wise in the ways of usability attempted to extract all elements which frustrated them about our current Glasgow Green mapping solution.
Everyone seems to be right in the swing of things now an usability testing is becoming a very productive process. The good news is that all of the previous issues from the previous two weeks weren't even touched upon because they are a usability dream.
So here are the results summed up of our tests:
Woo! Lots of good feedback but what can we deduce from it fair green mappers? Well I'd say that we're definitely in need of describing the information on the map more. Everyone realises it's a map with resuable stuff on it but what does that mean to them? What is that going to do for their lives? We have to start putting them into the picture, help them visualize how to use the map. We've spoke in the past about breaking the map into three concepts: what is this?, give something and buy something. So these are going to be moved to the front of the map.
Also we need signaling of where users are searching, we need more feedback of what they are looking at with icons and maybe more visual feedback.
Wooo, go green mappers.
Everyone seems to be right in the swing of things now an usability testing is becoming a very productive process. The good news is that all of the previous issues from the previous two weeks weren't even touched upon because they are a usability dream.
So here are the results summed up of our tests:
User #1 Erin, 20's, Helper: Brendan
- Go buttons can be merged into one
- Bag picture should link to map while that page exists
- move marker to postcode isn't understood well
- users could confirm postcodes and details on map
User #2 Paul, 30's, Helper: Sara
- Feels good about using map
- needs more explanation
- fix back button
- make submit buttons bigger
- more icons like DIY
- Street search needed
- Auto completion
- Shop owners and finders distinction
- Combine go buttons
- entering postcode needs to be made clearer
- home area for map?
User #3 Alex, 20's, Helpers: Kevin & Vichar
- Easy to achieve common tasks
- Good info coverage in details
- Simple searches
- more help with tasks to help suggest how to use the map
- Needs an A-Z directory
- Auto completion of streets in Glasgow
- Is everything on there? Not sure of completion of info?
- Back doesn't work
- No feedback for last search
Woo! Lots of good feedback but what can we deduce from it fair green mappers? Well I'd say that we're definitely in need of describing the information on the map more. Everyone realises it's a map with resuable stuff on it but what does that mean to them? What is that going to do for their lives? We have to start putting them into the picture, help them visualize how to use the map. We've spoke in the past about breaking the map into three concepts: what is this?, give something and buy something. So these are going to be moved to the front of the map.
Also we need signaling of where users are searching, we need more feedback of what they are looking at with icons and maybe more visual feedback.
Wooo, go green mappers.
A beautifully inky smelling, brand spanking new Glasgow green map has now been published and is circling it's way around Glasgow's most exclusive second hand shops!
Where can I get one?
I hear you cry. You can email us for one at info@deargreenplace.org or you can pick it up from one of the second hand shops on the map. You'll soon also be able to download it here and from the main site.
Well done everyone!
So what are they doing now?
Oh but we've only just begun. Now that we have one notch in our belt we are beginning to turn our attentions to a web based green map that will be constantly updated by you!
Meeting #24 summed up
Agenda
1. News / What peeps did since last meeting
2. Coo over map.
3. Review most important functionality of online map.
4. Plan of distribution.
5. Online monitoring
6. Testing: Franki / Hannah
7. Dev: Kevin and joe change add place
8. Tasks!
We mostly justed cooed and had a think about where our efforts should be focused. We reviewed what we wanted first from the web site and found that first and foremost we need to get it to collect information based on the impact of the paper based map. A form to enable peeps to give feed back. Also its important for us to have it available in a downloadable form as soon as possible. Franki offered to break up her fantastical design into small palatable fantastical areas, each on a seperate A4 page(since most grans don't pack an A1 printer beside the biscuits).
The most important priorites for the web map are:
1. Feedback and distribution of the download map
2. Add categories of Environmental Proj & Reuse Proj
3. Content from the map for web
Usability testing
Usability testing was carried out by Fanki and Hannah to find that the user could carry out the tasks quickly and instinctively found the areas of the map needed, even with it broken. This user was the news browsing type and had a bit of experience with google maps and so knew how to use all the controls straight away. Notably she enjoyed the experience of adding an icon to the map and found it easy to click the next arrows during the process.
Points taken from testing:
Add place functionality has improved
Messages to help when adding a shop but could be revised.
User used home as point of reference
The area selection was the next stop after the map.
Tasks
Add stats to pages
Get Franki disk
Get Kevin illustrator
Make online form
fix zooming in again
Divide up map for web
Make a synchroniser for the spreadsheet and web DB
Crack! Smack, we're back on track. The Glasgow green map was unofficially taking a little rest for two weeks since there wasn't really that much volunteers could do to help. The Paper based map was finally handed off to the designers at scratch design, meanwhile the web based map took a pelting to its productivity curve due to network infrastructure. The web map will eventually be deployed at the electron club ( CCA Glasgow ) and we have long term concerns in mind for both the Electron Club and Green Map at heart. In the short term we could just stick the site on a commercial web host but that doesn't take much community effort. The network within the Electron Club is thanks to the hard work of Andrew Back and Simon () who setup both internal/external access for the project server that is to be the home for the green map virtual host ( where the web pages and code will reside ). Additional thanks goes to Alex Suttcliffe for his snappy work to set up the preliminary configuration of our green map host; setting up accounts, installing programs and some configuration. Although the whole network setup took a little longer to get right it was a chance for some community efforts to really show their value to the project. When eventually this project is realized for the success it will inevitably become; those involved in setup, information gathering, think work, art & design, programming, distribution, promotion can not only feel proud about what they have contributed to, but can also rest assured that it was only realized through the team efforts of everyone equally. Every move we've made so far has been democratically voted upon or trusted to those with relevant former experience. All of these people are working to help one another in the electron club and in the process make Glasgow a greener city.
The Last Meeting
This was really a pat on the back meeting to sit back and review exactly where we were at within the Green Map. On the whole we are running dead on time but we now have to start planning out where exactly the bottle necks are going to be within the project in light of our former experience.
The Green Map is lucky enough to have just received some additional funding so we were having a think about how it should be best spent in the coming months.
Here were the expressed preferences:
1. Members of the club: It's members that are making the map happen and its important that they are valued for the work they contribute and that they in return receive from the project. We've thoughts of hiring people to speak, paying traveling expenses and pizza. If anyone else has any (realistic) thoughts please speak up.
2. Marketing: In order for all of our hard work to actually reach any kind of audience it will have to be intensely and well marketed. All products need good marketing no matter how good they are. Bad products are constantly thrown in our face and so generate an audience "just because" it was sheerly caught within the audience. All of those involved in the Green Map know its benefit to the community and it's going to be our responsibility it finds its way to those it will affect. If we can just get their interest once, the actual maps functionality will carry us through.
3. User / Usability testing: When making a product it would be arrogant and indeed ignorant to presume that those involved in developing the product share the exact tastes and preferences as those to which it is aimed. In order for the Online Green Map to be a success it will have to be useful within the first 10 seconds of loading up or the users are just going to get bored/frustrated and venture off. We'll achieve this by getting a few of those users in and watch exactly how they use the site and base our changes around what they actually need. To do this properly we'll probably need to pay a few select users.
4. Contingency: There's bound to be something else.
It has been considered that it may be wise to restructure the weekly meetings slightly by setting agendas before hand, me and Hannah will make sure that everyone will have access to them every week and people can decide if they want to come along based on what we're geared to speak on. Of course everyone is still more than welcome to attend every single meeting, we just want to make sure that the programming peeps and he marketing peeps can confidently 'talk shop' without anyones eyes glazing over.
To all the developers: The links page has been updated with our story planner and host. I'm going to stick up some stories soon and then we'll look them over with Liz, Frankie and co. If anyone wants to have a stab at adding a few go ahead and put them in the first iteration (Two weeks) we'll worry about cleaning it up once there's something to clean up.
We plotted out a small timeline that showed we were going to have to get a move on and start user testing soon but really showed everything was looking dandy. Well done to Hannah for getting her Job!
The Last Meeting
This was really a pat on the back meeting to sit back and review exactly where we were at within the Green Map. On the whole we are running dead on time but we now have to start planning out where exactly the bottle necks are going to be within the project in light of our former experience.
The Green Map is lucky enough to have just received some additional funding so we were having a think about how it should be best spent in the coming months.
Here were the expressed preferences:
1. Members of the club: It's members that are making the map happen and its important that they are valued for the work they contribute and that they in return receive from the project. We've thoughts of hiring people to speak, paying traveling expenses and pizza. If anyone else has any (realistic) thoughts please speak up.
2. Marketing: In order for all of our hard work to actually reach any kind of audience it will have to be intensely and well marketed. All products need good marketing no matter how good they are. Bad products are constantly thrown in our face and so generate an audience "just because" it was sheerly caught within the audience. All of those involved in the Green Map know its benefit to the community and it's going to be our responsibility it finds its way to those it will affect. If we can just get their interest once, the actual maps functionality will carry us through.
3. User / Usability testing: When making a product it would be arrogant and indeed ignorant to presume that those involved in developing the product share the exact tastes and preferences as those to which it is aimed. In order for the Online Green Map to be a success it will have to be useful within the first 10 seconds of loading up or the users are just going to get bored/frustrated and venture off. We'll achieve this by getting a few of those users in and watch exactly how they use the site and base our changes around what they actually need. To do this properly we'll probably need to pay a few select users.
4. Contingency: There's bound to be something else.
It has been considered that it may be wise to restructure the weekly meetings slightly by setting agendas before hand, me and Hannah will make sure that everyone will have access to them every week and people can decide if they want to come along based on what we're geared to speak on. Of course everyone is still more than welcome to attend every single meeting, we just want to make sure that the programming peeps and he marketing peeps can confidently 'talk shop' without anyones eyes glazing over.
To all the developers: The links page has been updated with our story planner and host. I'm going to stick up some stories soon and then we'll look them over with Liz, Frankie and co. If anyone wants to have a stab at adding a few go ahead and put them in the first iteration (Two weeks) we'll worry about cleaning it up once there's something to clean up.
We plotted out a small timeline that showed we were going to have to get a move on and start user testing soon but really showed everything was looking dandy. Well done to Hannah for getting her Job!
Wow, thats nine meetings now. This week we spoke about the final slap dash to get the paper based map ready to go. Now that we have all the data fitting it on to the map is actually proving to be difficult! Franki also unveiled some of her working ideas for the identity of the map which sadly weren't all working at the meeting but fear not! I've plonked them about here for everyone to glaze over.
Like the last meeting, ideas of how the site would look was a focus. Timeless, contemporary or current fashion? Either way we'll of course be sure to design it elegantly. I tend to lean towards current fashion. There are definitely some very different mixed ideas about how the map will look and it will be great to have everyones ideas developing slowly out loud in opinions and on paper. Franki has been slowly working with Scratch design to emphasise the idea of finding both small hidden treasures and valuable items in charity shops. I think its starting to come across really well and shows a clearer purpose for the green map.
Honestly these are great Franki, its a shame we couldn't have chatted more about these images.
People keep coming up with very idilic communityesque ideas where in an environment with changing weather people are doing things in the background like riding bikes and carrying tables. Sounds nice to me. I'll post up some of my mocks soon as well and maybe we can put up others thumbnails if we get them scanned in.
Everyone has 2 tasks this week:
Little thumbnails of what a Glasgow Green Map web site could look like.
Lists of links that could be in the navigation of the glasgow green map site.
Good luck everyone!
This afternoon, Hannah, Franki, Sara, Tom and I met up at the Electron Club for some action-packed data verification fun in preparation for the paper-based map design.
Hannah has been working really hard to put together a list of green facilities across Glasgow and we've now got a database of about 130 organisations, with roughly 40 pieces of data for each.
Armed with a bunch of laptops, we set to the task of verifying all the information and plotting it on a map, ready to send to the graphic designers. As the Glasgow Green Map's resident software developer for the day, I came up with various wee tools to help clean up and transform the database for Hannah and Sara.
Meanwhile, Franki did some great Illustrator wizardry — incorporating feedback from Thursday's meeting into her amazing design ideas for the project's branding, while Sara showed off her Word and Excel prowess; trawling through the data and making sure everything was spot on. Hannah and I then used the prototype green maps, the Glasgow A-Z, Google and Hannah's aging laptop to locate each organisation and catalogue them on a map.
Many hours later, followed by a spectacularly depressing Illustrator crash, followed by another few hours of Hannah re-doing most of that work, the map was complete!
In an bid to get away from the Illustrator trauma, I wrote a program to extract addresses from our data set, making each of the organisations visible on Google Maps and Google Earth. It's not particularly accurate (some points are in the River Clyde, or hover around the equator!), but here are some links to the web-based map and the Google Earth version.
Have a nice weekend and happy mapping to all!
Hannah has been working really hard to put together a list of green facilities across Glasgow and we've now got a database of about 130 organisations, with roughly 40 pieces of data for each.
Armed with a bunch of laptops, we set to the task of verifying all the information and plotting it on a map, ready to send to the graphic designers. As the Glasgow Green Map's resident software developer for the day, I came up with various wee tools to help clean up and transform the database for Hannah and Sara.
Meanwhile, Franki did some great Illustrator wizardry — incorporating feedback from Thursday's meeting into her amazing design ideas for the project's branding, while Sara showed off her Word and Excel prowess; trawling through the data and making sure everything was spot on. Hannah and I then used the prototype green maps, the Glasgow A-Z, Google and Hannah's aging laptop to locate each organisation and catalogue them on a map.
Many hours later, followed by a spectacularly depressing Illustrator crash, followed by another few hours of Hannah re-doing most of that work, the map was complete!
In an bid to get away from the Illustrator trauma, I wrote a program to extract addresses from our data set, making each of the organisations visible on Google Maps and Google Earth. It's not particularly accurate (some points are in the River Clyde, or hover around the equator!), but here are some links to the web-based map and the Google Earth version.
Have a nice weekend and happy mapping to all!
We once again explored the world of possibilities for the Glaasgow Green Map but for the first time we had a demo version of our map! Seb from the corkgreen map very generously donated an example base for us to start working upon. Our newest volunteer Joseph gave everyone a quick spin of the demo map to show everyone its wonders. We also had an appearance from Robb who came up with a lot of great ideas for the graphical branding of the green map.
We also had our first view of ideas for the 
Scratch had also came up with a nice idea of cascading arrows of reuse design which almost eluded to floating autumn leaves in the wind. These were all very early conceptions and we'll be looking forward to it evolving in future. The group all individually expressed some great ideas, like the actual geographic shapes of greater
Tasks
-------
Hannah
- Blog! + facts
- Speak with recycling officer
- Add more graphics to planner
- Bring in
Chris
- Set up local dev greenmap
- Look at a feasible data extraction tool
- Blog!
Robb
- Review blog
- Ideas for Graphic identity
Liz
- Blog!
- Add intro to planner
- Add scans to planner
Joe
- Make Green map dev set up guide
- Fiddle with map code
Kevin
- Set up project host
Franki
- Think of more graphic identity ideas for green map
Everyone say hi to Alice and Stuart! Tonight's Map saw us finally get some contact with what Hannah coins as a 'cartographic eye'. Mapping student Stuart Clay has mingled with us humble green mappers. We also were visited by another of the initial graphic designers for the concept of a Glasgow Green Map 2 years ago!
Stuart and Liz
Me hannah and Alice
In this past week we have seen a lot of people questioning what they think the green map will achieve and asking what they can contribute. We'll hopefully soon have some pretty pictures to display as we are soon starting on scanning in and gathering more media to better visually document our progress so that the rest of the community can see our progress. I was also chatting with Sam from the CCA about the possibility of running some workshops for kids to get involved for the Green Map, which is a great start for getting it moving in the community. I'll be able to test out some ideas and get some good feed back close to home, long before we start our outward marketing.
Green Mappers
Heres our list of stuff to do for the next green map meeting:
Everyone: Glasgow eco facts.
Electron Club Contributors: Sit with Graphic Designer to review stuff.
Alex Sutcliffe: Add Green Map MySql DB based on schema.
Liz Eevwes: Start a brief intro presentation using stuff on project planner.
Will Foster: Talk with Bob about interviews.
Will Foster: Put a start to interview questions in the project planner on the writeboard.
Everyone: Get Scanner set up for Electron Club and Green map
Hannah Clinch: Talk to Gary Beacham, get him to spill the eco beans.
Hannah Clinch: Blog!
Hannah Clinch: Finalise DB data, talk with the verification peeps.
Hannah Clinch: Schedule data verification day.
Eve McGregor: Have Coffee with Hannah.
Eve McGregor: Blog!
Stuart Clay: Contact Green Party about Green Map
Stuart Clay: Put up fliers around class
Stuart Clay: Login to planner
Alice Tyler: Login to planner
Alice Tyler: Find Glasgow Eco facts
Kevin mcdonagh: Blog
Kevin mcdonagh: Put up 'Next Event" on Green Map Blog
Kevin, Alex & Developers: Estimate Production green map site setup times
Kevin mcdonagh: Setup others with blog
Woo Woo! Go Go green Mappers!
Stuart and Liz
Me hannah and Alice
In this past week we have seen a lot of people questioning what they think the green map will achieve and asking what they can contribute. We'll hopefully soon have some pretty pictures to display as we are soon starting on scanning in and gathering more media to better visually document our progress so that the rest of the community can see our progress. I was also chatting with Sam from the CCA about the possibility of running some workshops for kids to get involved for the Green Map, which is a great start for getting it moving in the community. I'll be able to test out some ideas and get some good feed back close to home, long before we start our outward marketing.
Green Mappers
Heres our list of stuff to do for the next green map meeting:
Everyone: Glasgow eco facts.
Electron Club Contributors: Sit with Graphic Designer to review stuff.
Alex Sutcliffe: Add Green Map MySql DB based on schema.
Liz Eevwes: Start a brief intro presentation using stuff on project planner.
Will Foster: Talk with Bob about interviews.
Will Foster: Put a start to interview questions in the project planner on the writeboard.
Everyone: Get Scanner set up for Electron Club and Green map
Hannah Clinch: Talk to Gary Beacham, get him to spill the eco beans.
Hannah Clinch: Blog!
Hannah Clinch: Finalise DB data, talk with the verification peeps.
Hannah Clinch: Schedule data verification day.
Eve McGregor: Have Coffee with Hannah.
Eve McGregor: Blog!
Stuart Clay: Contact Green Party about Green Map
Stuart Clay: Put up fliers around class
Stuart Clay: Login to planner
Alice Tyler: Login to planner
Alice Tyler: Find Glasgow Eco facts
Kevin mcdonagh: Blog
Kevin mcdonagh: Put up 'Next Event" on Green Map Blog
Kevin, Alex & Developers: Estimate Production green map site setup times
Kevin mcdonagh: Setup others with blog
Woo Woo! Go Go green Mappers!
I'd like to say Hi to the new contributers Will, Liz and Alex. All of whom were at the last meeting. There were a lot of great marketing ideas being thrown around the meeting my fave of which was the scanning in of personal note books for display in the site. Will said: "Better to just over document everything" which I think will serve us really well. Hopefully all the knowledge we gater we can share with the Glasgow community to do with as they please. Notebooks, videos, photos all that good stuff.
Sorry it took so long to skin the blog but I was dumb founded by these new blogger widget things. Everything is not perfect some links are duff and the sections that are scored out will be up soon, but getting something up soon as possible is better than something perfect that no one will see.
Sorry it took so long to skin the blog but I was dumb founded by these new blogger widget things. Everything is not perfect some links are duff and the sections that are scored out will be up soon, but getting something up soon as possible is better than something perfect that no one will see.
Woo! More volunteers! It's nice to see more people coming along as they hear about our interesting project. That must mean we are doing something that interests peoples curiosity!
I tried out my first workshop "Google Maps explained" which is meant as a very easy introduction for beginners and those not used to computers.I gave the thrown together class to some not beginners and it went down pretty well. It illustrated once again that when people are giving up their time for some sort of tutorial or workshop you should be well prepared because otherwise why would they give up their time? In saying that I think everyone enjoyed themselves and I learnt a little bit about how to handle the presentation a bit better next time. Having tasks for people to do as quickly as possible is important rather than having people listen to someone talking, I guess thats why its a "workshop".
We all agreed on some tasks on the trusty white board but alas there were no programmers if there are any programmers out there interested in the project get in touch!
Go go green map team!
And since I never posted last week... I've included a pic of our last meeting (Green Map meeting #1).
Green map meeting #1 tasks
I tried out my first workshop "Google Maps explained" which is meant as a very easy introduction for beginners and those not used to computers.I gave the thrown together class to some not beginners and it went down pretty well. It illustrated once again that when people are giving up their time for some sort of tutorial or workshop you should be well prepared because otherwise why would they give up their time? In saying that I think everyone enjoyed themselves and I learnt a little bit about how to handle the presentation a bit better next time. Having tasks for people to do as quickly as possible is important rather than having people listen to someone talking, I guess thats why its a "workshop".
We all agreed on some tasks on the trusty white board but alas there were no programmers if there are any programmers out there interested in the project get in touch!Go go green map team!
And since I never posted last week... I've included a pic of our last meeting (Green Map meeting #1).
Green map meeting #1 tasks
