There is loads going in on in Glasgow in terms of sustainable development, but how do you get to know about events, new green suppliers, services and green points of view?

The Glasgow Green Map would like to find ways to get a cross section of people from across the city communicating by offering this website as a platform for locally (Glasgow ) focused green news. This will work in conjunction with the progression of the Glasgow Green Map, which is in development at the moment.

So  if you have a keen interest and something to write about regarding gap sites, gardening, sustainable design, recycling, reusing, bikes, local food, community regeneration …….. please get in touch with us here at the info@deargreenplace.org

Glasgow Wood Recycling, a social enterprise and charity, is holding an information event in Partick Sat 1st November, come rain or shine.

The event aims to raise awareness of the organisation’s plans to develop a bit of derelict green space into a wood recycling and environmental resource. There will be gardening activities, design concepts and ideas presented by Glasgow School of Art’s product design department as well as information about the initiative.

Sat Nov 1^st @ 11am – 3pm

just off Dalcross St/Dalcross Pass, G11 5RA

To find out more please drop by on the day

or call us: 0141 944 65 41

hannah@glasgowwoodrecycling.org.uk

So if you go to: http://www.deargreenplace.org you’ll find the same old map, we know. But there is a new version that we’re trying to find the time to get moved over from http://dev.deargreenplace.org. So although its not live for everyone to see, it exists which is cause for celebration and shows how far we’re coming along. Also worthy of note we have a new printed edition of the green map hitting the street and it looks grand!

Retrospective

So last Thursday we finally got around to reflecting on the time we’ve spent upgrading the map from the previous version. It took a long time(too long) to change because we had very little programming and development for a while but things are definitely starting to look up. Although our online map is as always a work in progress we were very happy to see the end product of the 2nd printed edition. We feel that it is all together much clearer and brighter than the original and Frankie’s done a great job.

It’s important to tae time out to all huddle heads together and vent opinions. Having a time set aside for this means that everyone is up to date with the groups ideas and all have the opportunity to to contribute. We have only a short time at the meetings every Thursday night and those who attend want to come in with set tasks and produce something tangible by the end of the night. Getting caught up with ‘what ifs’ and debates can eat into this time so setting aside time to weed out different areas of opinion and improvement, is important. Next time I think we’ll need to speed it up much more as a few people fell asleep. So next time we’ll have a quick fire round and then just on to normal tasks with optional discussion.

We’ve been steadily making head way towards this end goal of having a newly designed, more usable online green map for some time but we aren’t finished yet! In the next month or so we’ll be in tidying up everything that we have got working so far and patching our production release with fixes.

I announced that after we have a stable version of our map working across browsers we will be coming up with a process to branch off and develop a universal green map solution in parallel. Thats is definitely going to take some thought and consideration as to how to make the difference between the two different projects as clear as possible.

Our whiteboard

Ok without further ado, this is how we ran through our opinions.

White Hat - Impartial Facts
Yellow Hat - Optimistic opinions
Black - Pessimistic opinions
Green Hat - alternative ideas
Red Hat - Emotive, unjustified opinions
Blue at - Process & improvement ideas

White Hat - The cold facts

1st Edition 20,000
2nd 5000 printed with the generous support of clean Glasgow
About 10 regular weekly contributing members
No releases into production
Open greenmap testing with Govanhill greenmap group
CCA network connection is not performant for contributers working on the greenmap
Good links and assosciations with greenmap.org
Green maps have gained more public mindshare through the past two years marketting
1st married member
Online dev map is not usable by the majority of the public (ie6)
Although we have images for all locations on the map no images are viewable on the site.
A new, much clearer visual identity
Data is bang up to date
Easy for programmers to get up and running with the development map on their laptops

Yellow hat - Sunny side opinions

We’ve built a lot of key contacts in public and media sectors and have developed a lot of contacts who are interested in how our project will develop in future
As we develop a better product and continue investing time our exposure is getting better and better
We are gradually being identified as desirable working partner by other groups and associations
All aspects are helped by having the physical map
We have produced a very focused product compared to some green maps that just start with all categories. Instead we have begun with reuse facilities and will gradually build on that from a core audience.
The new design is better
Our technology is becoming a standard

Black - Opinions from the dark side

Hard to get feedback from:
Shop owners
People who use the map
people who are benefitted from the map
Charity shops don’t feel connected to the community of ‘reuse’ as a whole
Todos do not make sense to everyone
no tasks for anyone who is not a programmer
Finished Website is not up
No one is completely clear of the setup of the PROD/DEV environment for the greenmap
Unclear aims and goals
No clear benefits to end users
No marketing pack
Can’t find through popular directories (online and offline)
Inconsistent support for website
Not useful online to the majority of people
People who don’t program are unsure of what to do at meetings
unclear comments
People are hubs of knowledge on their own particular area
Bugs are not captured in one place

Red Hat - Emotional unjustified ranty opinions

less to do
learning lots
productive
everyone is benefitting from the experience
Very educational
Personal promotion
Best way to spend a Thursday night!

Green Hat - Alternative opinions

Impartial reviews
To dos for other than programmers
packs for school teachers
Stickers
free marketing
Aggregated live data
Live architecture diagram
Clearer message of promotion on front page
case studies
list of passes
Bought form his shop photos and features

Blue Hat - Make it better! Process improvements

Come up with a unified goal and description for the aims aof the group and our product/client
Come up with a way to present 2 lists of To dos that includes tasks for EVERYONE. (Next week and this month)
Draw up an architecture diagram and make sure everyone understands.
Get everyone involved in the administration serverside
Fix web site in ie6

I’d just like to take the opportunity to say thanks for everyone’s hard work and commitment. Me and Hannah know how much love you put into all your work and it’s just great. If we keep working like we are I promise that the rewards from the experience will only keep getting better. I look forward to getting back and helping out but until 3weeks time, Byeee!

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

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:

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.

hi everyone!

We’ve been having great sessions on the icon updating over here, and had a breakthrough in how we think about organizing the set. We are now building a different kind of online tool to review them. We are aiming to open this to the public and Mapmaker comment in early September.

You’ll be able to take part and see the final version of Green Map Icons, Version 3 take shape this fall, with the goal of completing all (yes!) by Dec 1 (font-making, posters, etc will follow). More news on this soon.

Kit Robinson of the Lake Washington - Cascadian Watershed Green Mao (in Washington State, US) has made a really cool interactive map of the Green Maps - it’s ‘fed’ by the Map Profiles in the Greenhouse. We’ll be linking it in soon, and hope your projects will show up on it! (so hint, hint! if you have yet to re-register, click Participate! and if your Map Profile’s not up yet, please add it…..

Congrats to Hannah Clinch & everyone at Radius Glasgow, the new Dear Green Place guide to Reuse is wonderful! It’s got many innovative features to its design. See it at our site or www.deargreenplace.org.

We also received a big box full of new Green Map created in Taiwan - each one is a work of Art! Thanks to all involved at SOW.

and here is our latest press: http://www.licmagazine.com/

Feel free to add your news to the Blog! You can also add a comment to someone else’s Blog anytime, too!

Note there are subtle changes underway on the website, too: Now you can see how many are using it on the home page (on the right) . Your suggestions are always welcome. all the best, Wendy

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