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.