(I'm writing about:
http://hurmy.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page ; for some background, see http://sdtjdphevents.blogspot.com/2008/01/meeting-about-integrating-san-diego.html)

I like this a lot--especially because it is very expandable (within the limits of the name and the regional limit we give it) and because I'm not the main motivator behind it :-)

Mapping (part one)

In mentioning the mapping piece, when talking about the sdtjdph blog with others, Yelp.com came up--they have a pretty neat way of helping people find neighborhoods.

Try a search in San Diego for "canyon".
http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=canyon&ns=1&rpp=10&find_loc=san+diego%2C+ca

I think what you have will work for having a neighborhood focus, as long as people can be aided in finding their neighborhood. [I suppose I could come up with instructions here: type your zip into yelp.com--click on "search in area (walking distance or biking distance)"]. I see, though, that yelp does not have all neighborhoods.

----------------------
Motivational Sustainablity

Also (or primarily): How can we get people to contribute and care for this thing? especially given that a lot of our work aims to get people away from the computer. (or better said: to use the computer to enhance/aid their in-person designing, planting, and meeting).

The main work I'd like to do:

(1) Tell people I meet/know about the collaborative site.

(2) Post occasionally to it. Events, reports, etc.

(3) Help compile areas of information I have interest in.

If we can create something that our existing communities (FNL? who else? ASD? peace & justice? SD permaculturists?) would use, then maybe we don't need to sweat about trying to market it **except as part of the marketing we/others do for events we organize.**

For example, I could use the wiki for all events of the Rolando, College, El Cerrito-area gardeners, advertising the regional wiki in the process.

Would FNL participants contribute?

So, could we create something that FNL list members would use? We could answer composting questions on the wiki, for example, and reply to the list with: "here's the wiki page addressing this question, add future responses there. . ." e.g., http://hurmy.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Composting

Piggyback on other sites?

We might also, like Julie did with the Craigslist farm and gardens category, try to get existing sites to offer what we want.

Getting events to map by neighborhood would be a significant accomplishment--should we try this on our own, or try to piggyback on yelp or craigslist or google by getting them to add that feature?

Categories

Categories are hard unless you can use tagging, such as on blogger, to let content easily appear in multiple categories.

Say I post the Tule/Cattail weaving event. I tag it with "primitive skills, [nearby neighborhoods/zip codes], San Diego River, handcrafts, [the date]"

Ideally it shows up in all the related places in the categories, calendar, and maps.

Ideally, looking at the knowledge base on composting would include a link to related events (or display them in a frame).

Mapping (continued)

The Mapping element of that seems the most challenging. If we can automate the following step (or use another site's implementation) for converting an address to a Latitude and Longitude, that would be a start:

The following site lets me type in 92115, USA to get decimal lat, long:
Decimal 32.756669-117.070805
http://www.mapchannels.com/GeocoderSimple.aspx

Also, ideally we could geocode a polygon and a route--such as the area within which a bikeride would take place... and have searches by zip/neighborhood, bring up any content item with a polygon that overlaps.

Check this out:
I added an event to yelp without knowing the exact address (only the cross streets):
http://www.yelp.com/events/san-diego-sd-food-not-lawns-meeting


Peace,
Colin
http://sdtjdph.blogspot.com/

Note that we're not the only one working on this sort of project--see also:
http://www.sd-fun.org/ (SD Family Urban Network) for a local-focused wiki, found through http://carsharingsd.blogspot.com/

2008/1/21, Ian Miller <ircone@yahoo.com>:
Hey gang,

Here's my start to the wiki:
http://hurmy.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

There's not much in there yet, but drill down into the events section.  That's where I'm focusing my effort right now.  If you have content for the Blogs section or other section you can go ahead and throw it in there.  We can copy it over when we have a final place for this to live later.

Colin, since you're my main stakeholder in the local view of the events, I'll want your guidance in how granular to get.  I'm starting with areas like "North Park, City Heights, Hillcrest" but would zip code be easier/better?  Also, we have smaller names closer to the city but what about the car-free people that might exist in Oceanside...are there well defined "town names" up there?  Just some pieces I'm struggling with.

Under each of the "areas of interest" I can make the tables sortable (and have done so on the first category I've started playing with, "food justice/growing") so that you can still look for local stuff inside of an interest.  Some interest categories may have 50+ organizations associated with them.

My first stab at the hierarchy is Category > Organization > Calendar.  How do you all feel about that?  I think we can have aggregate calendars on the category pages too...so people who don't want to drill down as far as organization can still see all the events for a category across multiple organizations (and potentially individuals?...haven't figured out how to work them in here yet).

I think individuals might be hard to represent via categories since so many of us are interested in a collection of stuff from across many categories...plus some people might not want to be represented in a wiki for privacy reasons...not sure.  Might have a separate section just for people...and the context might be volunteers interested in mentoring in certain subjects...

Give me your feedback and I'll see what I can do to adjust the wiki.  I've linked to just some sample data, bogus urls and demo calendars in some places just to throw this together, so don't expect everything to work  ;^)  The big breakthrough I had this morning was being able to link to any iCal out there on the web and throw it into google calendar...unfortunately, I don't see a way to view a calendar without first importing it into Google.  That's where I'll need to install a little calendar viewer that lets us view any iCal calendar on the web.  Also have to figure out how to add iframes on wikis...wikis have strict rules to keep people from adding certain stuff to them...have to break some of those rules now  ;^)

-Ian