Make it easier to find geographical groups

Posted by zirvap on April 21, 2009 at 5:33pm

There are so many geographical groups now that it's difficult to find out if there's a group for an area you're interested in. I suggest:

splitting up the category geographical into subcategories for continents and countries
show the group category on the main group page (because mistakes happen, and it's easier to catch them if a group's current category is visible to the people using the group)

Geography comes pretty close to politics when it comes to splitting up the world in regions and grouping countries, but if we use a reasonably neutral source, for instance http://www.geonames.org/countries/ , there should (hopefully!) not be to many controversies.

I'm not sure if we'd want subategories for every country, or just those which have several groups, like Germany and USA.

Comments

location/maps

Posted by greggles on April 22, 2009 at 1:43am

We are discussing how to best achieve the general goal of "make it easier to find geographpical groups". My current idea is to use Location+Gmap module set for this since they are the most feature rich and stable right now.

This would allow users to select their solution and then show a list of groups sorted by distance from that location.

I'd love to brainstorm on this idea and hear feedback from the community. Also crossposting to the maps/geo group.

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Finding Drupal neighbors

Posted by JuliaKM on April 25, 2009 at 2:08pm

I think that Location+Gmap could work. One problem is that we have state-level and city-level groups. For example, I'm not sure where the Drupal North Carolina group would go on a map. It would be nice to have a hierarchical taxonomy where I could browse and see classified groups, in addition to a Gmap. For example, I could click on "North Carolina" and see all of the city-level groups.

Example:
- North Carolina
----- Charlotte
----- Triangle NC
----- Asheville

It seems to make more sense to just show the city-level groups on a map and to use state-level ones only for classifying purposes.

If we implemented geographic classification, it would also be useful to have posts from nearby groups automatically aggregated on each group page. There could be a block that showed events within 100 miles of me.

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Posted by zirvap on April 28, 2009 at 3:52pm

Location + gmaps (or another mapping module) sound fine. What needs to be done to get those modules installed on gdo?

I don't know how accessible gmap is for blind people, but a "list all groups near a specified place" function would hopefully do the job for them.

I haven't thought much about the problem you mention, JuliaKM. Where I live, there's just one group for the whole country. I'd guess that we'd want to show all levels of groups on the same map (ie. show both Germany and München, both North Carolina and Charlotte). If we only show city level groups, how will people find the Germany group or the NC group, or even know that they exist?
There's an option for taxonomy based markers in Gmap, we can make a "type of local group" category to show country level and state level groups in different colours than the rest. (As for where to place the marker for a bigger area, I suggest we just go for the suggestions from geonames.org. They have a lat/long for every place on their list.)

Some time in the future I'd like to be able to see local groups and local sites (http://drupal.org/language-specific-communities) on the same map. That can be done by creating a content type for link to local site, and add location info.

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Type of Group

Posted by JuliaKM on April 28, 2009 at 6:38pm

I think that Location + GMAP would work well. Filtering by a taxonomy for "type of local group" sounds like a great idea. We could potentially use GMap Taxonomy (part of the GMAP module) to present different types of geographic groups in different visual ways (different colored icons, etc.).

Great Idea

Posted by zzolo on April 28, 2009 at 4:47pm

I like this idea a lot.

Location allows to put in a full address, meaning that it would be easy to designate and search all NC, or even US groups together. It also tries to geocode that address, or just pick the latitude and longitude on a map (which is what most people would use since groups don't usually have actual addresses).

I think there are some limitations on using just points and not areas, meaning that a group would have just have to pick a point that represents their area the best. But I think this is good enough.

I do think this would be a pretty straight-forward use of GMap and Location, though; probably just needs some permission thoughts and theming.

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zzolo
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zzolo