Tag Archives: usability

State of Tech – NYCGA and beyond

Posted on by
Reply

I would like to outline some of the projects that are being worked on by the NYCGA tech community. We are always looking for more help, please volunteer.

  • Occupy Wiki – Currently a tech wiki, but there is more being planned. (wiki)
  • NYCGA.net – v2 – The social network for social change (wiki)
    • FGA – Federated General Assembly – (nycga.net v3) Federated out-of-the-box web site for General Assemblies, one click deployment for occupations anywhere.
  • News Wire – community curated news from around the web (wiki)
  • CiviCRM - Constituent relationship management - tool for outreach and inreach (wiki)
  • PermaBank – Gifting/sharing platform focused on individuals and projects, read the white paper (wiki)
  • Ushahidi - “We are a non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.” We are working on implementing this for dumb phone, smart phone, and computer mapping.
  • Freedom Tower – Providing free WiFi to the park (status unknown, no power at the park) (wiki)
  • Park Power – A bio-diesel Generator which was stolen by the police is possibly being returned.
If you would like to volunteer to help out, please do so here.

wiki.occupyeverywhere.org

This wiki is currently being developed by a group of people at OWS. Initial planning stages are underway and a e-mail list serv is being set up for communications. The wiki currently keeps track of Occupy software and hardware projects. There is an orientation manual about the tech groups at OWS. If you want to get involved this list of occupy websites is a good start, read through add some web sites or some descriptions.

NYCGA.net – v2 – New York General Assembly dot net

This site functions as the main internal informational for the NYCGA at Liberty Plaza. This site is built on WordPress running Buddypress plugin. The code base is available on GitHub. Currently Occupy Brooklyn, Occupy Jacksonville, and other occupations around the country are working to deploy the NYCGA.net code. Features and bugs can be viewed at underthehood.nycga.net. Much of the development communications happens on IRC freenode #nycga-iwg (chat logs) .

NYCGA.NET face lift.

NYCGA.net is undergoing a CSS refresh. You can read more about it from the UX sub-group.

NEWS WIRE – Occupy news syndication

According to the News Wire wiki page this project’s mission is:

We want to foster the growth of a distributed (not centralized) ecosystem of information solutions by making it easy to aggregate, organize, curate and interact with content coming from occupations. RSS is the perfect format for this job because the vast majority of occupations are currently publishing RSS feeds (whether they’re aware of it or not) that can easily be collected, organized and redistributed by anyone.

Currently there is a back-end (demo) which will allow a team of news curators to tag and filter all the content from RSS feeds that relate to the Occupy Movement. These feeds can be from occupation blogs, video channels, picture streams, main stream media feeds, or anything else with an RSS feed. News items can then be pushed to a public facing site.

The news wire can be deployed to any occupation so each GA can craft it’s own narrative of the global situation.

CiviCRM – Constituent relationship management, available for the Occupy Movement

Outreach and Movement Building are filling it a big list of contacts from other occupations. We are building a network. Ask Outreach for more information.

PermaBank – Wishing and Gifting.

Read the white papers here.

By allowing occupiers to manage their own wishes and match gifts directly to them we will be able to decentralize donations. In further iterations project management will be added and projects can be donated to directly. The development team is working with many operational groups on the ground to find out the best solutions for them.

Ushahidi - Crowd sourced event mapping

I walked past a TV on the side of the road today. With a service like Ushahidi I could have pulled out my phone and sent a text to an OWS server to add that TV to the “good swag” category on our shared map. This service could also map important events, like when radiohead showed up to Occupy Brooklyn. Best of all it’s free and anyone with a phone can use it!

Freedom Tower – free wifi to the park

The Free Network Foundation has donated a wifi tower to the park which provides internet to the occupation at Liberty Plaza. It has been online for a few weeks now, it is just missing power. This is the beginning of a mesh network. There are Freedom Towers in about 5 other occupations across the US. The towers can talk to each other…

Power at the park – Bio-diesel at the park (power to the people)

The bio-diesel generator being rescued from the police.

Information Architecture Includes Search

Posted on by
Reply

Searching through Tags and Category Taxonomies in BuddyPress

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/31558461[/vimeo]
This is an illustration of the “Query Multiple Taxonomies” plugin in a WordPress/ BuddyPress site. Some JQuery has been added. Note that this video shows a work in progress that still presents multiple issue to be solved.

Knowledge About Plugins Influences Design

When constructing wireframes or creating a Photoshop mockup knowing what is feasible with existing plugins should help to focus the range of options to design. In the current NYCGA.net site, there are already many plugins installed which could result in conflicts with any new plugin added.

When resources are finite, it is important to:

  1. Consider which plugins may offer a reasonable solution to an already identified problem.
  2. Test the plugin on its own (on a different server) to understand its capabilities.
  3. Test the plugin for compatibility with other existing plugins on the production server.
  4. If the plugin passes through the steps above, then consider investing time on designing a user experience related to that plugin