October 8, 2011
Code Sprint & Public Design Workshop at Code for America Offices
85 2nd Street (at Mission), San Francisco
10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
October 9, 2011
Community Graphics Installations at and around Hayes Valley Farm
450 Laguna (at Fell), San Francisco
12 p.m. - 5 p.m.
We would like to invite you to a unique little software & design event in which we launch a public directory of urban agriculture community groups for the Bay Area.
Free.
Sign up on this event page and/or register on Eventbrite.
http://citygroupsbayarea.eventbrite.com
CityGroups
CityGroups is a platform for creating public directories of community groups. CityGroups was developed as a Code for America project, to help community mapping projects in Seattle. We are working now in several cities to find ways to pool resources together to make this a sustainable, adaptable & persistent solution to serve all city residents.
CityGroups is an open source project built with Drupal. It provides community groups data through an API, which allows the information to be used in multiple contexts.
On the web
http://citygroups.org
http://seattle.citygroups.org
Design for Public Space
As part of this sprint, we will also work on designing neighborhood graphics for community groups, with the Hayes Valley Farm as our subject. The idea is to create graphics that can make local community groups more visible in our neighborhoods.
The Hayes Valley Farm is located at Fell & Laguna, and many people in the neighborhood see the farm and want to check out the farm, but never get around to it (though thousands of others volunteer at and talk about this farm internationally.)
What kinds of public design (especially signs and informational community boards) can we create encourage people to check out the farm, and what kinds of design elements would make the farm inviting to regular pedestrians? We hope to build understanding about similar principles that we can use to adapt for promoting Farmer’s Markets, Parks, Community Gardens, other civic spaces and opportunities. http://hayesvalleyfarm.com
Inspiration
http://candychang.com/
http://nonchalance.com
http://rebargroup.org/
http://iconathon.org
The Problem We Are Trying to Solve
Imagine a world in which a search for ‘urban agriculture’ would actually provide a balanced list of groups working for urban agriculture, community gardening, food groups and other small groups in the Bay Area - even if those communities were on different communication hubs - websites, blogs, Facebook, Meetups, or in real places in a neighborhood.
The way it is right now, everyone is spending hours searching the Internet and maintaining separate databases of the useful information they are finding. There is no public shared resource to make this easier to network groups. We are working to solve this problem by making this data more open, accessible & reusable.
What will we do?
On Saturday we will do work mostly indoors (talking, computing, drawing), and on Sunday we will work at & around the Hayes Valley Farm.
October 8, 2011
Saturday at Code for America Offices 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Schedule
(schedule is subject to change)
- Meet & Greet
- Quick presentations about Community Signs, CityGroups & various Urban Agriculture communities in the Bay Area
- Team Creation (facilitated group building activity)
- Project time (see list of project ideas)
- Presentations
Goal for Saturday
Move the issue of access to public information about Urban Agriculture groups in the Bay Area forward.
Who should come?
Urban Farmers, Developers, Drupallers, Neighborhood organizers, Community Gardeners, Urban Agriculturalists, Permaculturists, Designers, Sign-makers, Guerrilla Grafters, Map Nerds, Urban Planners
What to bring
- Laptops if you have them
- Sign & Stencil making supplies
- Examples of interesting public informational graphics or inspirational public art
- Lists of Urban Agriculture organizations & small community groups
- Friends who might want to participate, have them also sign up on Eventbrite.
*October 9, Sunday *
Hayes Valley Farm
12 - 5 p.m.
*Schedule *
(schedule is subject to change)
- Turning Compost
- Tour of the Farm
- Installing situational graphics in & around the neighborhood.
- Photo documenting resources
- User testing & Interviews
What to bring/wear
- Sturdy shoes
- Sunblock, water.
- You’ll be outside. You might get a little dirty.
Check out the Hayes Valley Farm website for more information.
http://hayesvalleyfarm.com
Things that can happen because we do this sprint
- Promote a way to provide information about urban agriculture groups to many people who need up to date information.
- Develop a data trade between urban agriculture & a community that wants urban agriculture.
- Make better community graphics.
- Build neighborhood resilience by helping people connect more easily.
Drupal Specific Things that can happen because of this sprint
- Get experience working on a Drupal product (i.e. Drupal distribution for a civic use)
- Collaborate with other Drupallers
- The CityGroups platform has many useful configurations to learn from - features, feeds, maps, geocoding, themeing. At the Boston sprint one person researched node.js, and @scor worked on RDF mapping and federated queries - so the technical opportunities range from beginner to very cutting edge. The reason we are doing a community sprint is because there is a huge need for learning more about Drupal by working on a real project.
Some Project Ideas
Design: Signs for the directory of groups
Design: Signs promoting kinds of groups
Geek: Focus on making a new module to theme the urban agriculture page
Strategy: Writing a statement about why the directory is useful & how it can be used
Geek: Email verification
Data: Add data to the site
Geek: Scrape old websites that have useful information
Note for Drupal
We had a well-attended sprint in Boston earlier in September - and since that event was promising & there was some interest in having an event in the Bay Area, we are doing it again!
I'm sharing this with several Drupal groups - there is a lot of room for exploring making Drupal itself better, working on general design & usability issues (Prairie Initiative), working on Drupal for community supported agriculture and learning more about Drupal & Open Government. This may seem crazy to some people - but we are investigating a new model for community sprints.