open source

Today at Open Source Bridge, Amye Scavarda and I co-presented a session on Thinking Like a Pirate (aka creating solid requirements docs, and how requirements docs help projects succeed).

Our slides are available here:

(As an aside, for those of you who don't know about Open Source Bridge, I'm glad you asked! It's an awesome, open source focused conference that occurs yearly in Portland, Oregon. Read more on their site.)

In our session, we fielded a question about some of the specific tools we use to build requirements docs. One of the things we use is an intake survey focused on design-related topics, and a participant asked if we'd be willing to share it out, to which I replied, "Sure!"

Which in turn meant I needed to make it pretty.

Intake surveys are incredibly useful tools. We generally use them as a way to start communication rolling on a project, and as a way of accomplishing some or all of the following goals:

• Learn about the organization's design aesthetic and needs;
• Begin to define a common vocabulary for web design and development;
• Start the conversations about the relationship between design, site architecture, and user experience;
• Begin to create the relationship between the communication leads for both stakeholders;
• Get a sense of the level of research that has gone into the project prior to beginning development; and
• Get a sense of how the organization responds to requests for information.

Below, I have included the general questions and structure of our intake survey. We vary the questions depending on the nature of the project; for example, if there is no desire to incorporate content rating, we don't ask the client to look at sites that feature content rating.

Earlier this fall, Mayor Sam Adams and the City of Portland made some strides toward more open data and transparency in government. One step in this direction is the site at http://publicalerts.org

I found the site via Justin Houk; shortly thereafter, Mayor Adams asked for any suggestions. At first glance, the site looks incredibly useful, and I'm glad to see the city moving in this direction. Here are some ideas that could be implemented on the platform.

Suggestions

• Each alert should be its own entity, with a unique linkable url.
• Alerts should be exposed via RSS feeds, and these feeds should be categorized by type of advisory, and zipcode (where it's relevant)
• Events that can be mapped should contain geodata -- I'm specifically thinking about alerts and advisories about power outages, road construction, accidents, or other events that can tied to a specific place.
• Alerts should be browsable by date.
• Individual alerts could be pushed to Twitter (or any other external microblogging platform) with a standard format: [type of alert]: [headline]: [link]. Using this format, a traffic advisory would look like: Traffic alert: Construction on I5 SB starting Dec 12, 8:00 PM : http://some.url

Most of this data is already being published, but it is not being generated in a format that contains this additional metadata. For example, see the Trimet Alert page. The type of structured data I describe would be very easily achieved using a variety of freely available open source tools, such as Drupal. Unfortunately, it appears that the city of Portland's web presence runs (at least partially) on a Cold Fusion based monstrosity (look for the tell-tale .cfm at the end of some urls. The stench of a Cold Fusion-based site is unmistakeable; it reeks of decaying technology ;) ).

But using the formats I describe above, you could create a searchable map of construction data and see what roads are under construction during specific times of day. Or, you could take a look at Trimet bus routes in NE Portland and see if there were any service interruptions before your trip. The city of Portland is already putting the time into creating this data, but changing the format in which they published it would make it more reusable, and, ultimately, more useful to more people.

Like I said earlier, maybe 2009 will be the year that people start taking data ownership seriously.

A spate of closings from Google, and the elimination of any free version of Sprout Builder should go a ways toward reinforcing what should have been obvious for a long time: when you rely on a free service, you are ceding control.

And, services close. License terms change. We don't need to look very hard to see examples of what happens when these services go away. Personally, I'd rather take on the work of archiving my own work (aka, keeping track of my own stuff) than trying to rebuild large pieces of my own work. And yes, Open Source tools help us have more control of our own work.

RE services closing, this should not be surprising. Really, I'm more surprised that anyone would actually be surprised.

And, a ht to Stephen Downes for continuing to highlight these issues, and Brian Lamb and Cole Camplese say more intelligent things about this.

Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

Additionally, the book covers some of the basics of when to use different types of resources in the classroom. Frequently, people talk about incorporating video, or audio, or social bookmarks, etc, into the classroom, but they never discuss effective uses of these tools. While this book is not exhaustive in these discussions, I attempted to create some context around creative and effective use of the social web in a learning environment.

On a related note, we have also decided to be more organized and systematic with regards to putting out occasional tutorials. They will be collected under the tutorials tag, and can be seen at http://funnymonkey.com/tutorials (or subscribed to via rss).

For people new to Drupal, Drupal in Education and E-Learning includes details on:

• Drupal terminology;
• User creation;
• Role based access control;
• Installing modules and themes;
• Using taxonomy to categorize posts
• Backing up and upgrading your site.

For more experienced Drupallers, the book covers:

• Using CCK to extend content types -- instructions cover sharing media, images, links, text, and files;
• An overview of Views 2, including adding new views, using the new access control mechanisms of Views 2, configuring multiple displays from a single view, and cloning and modifying existing views;
• An overview of Organic Groups, including instructions on how to use groups to support informal and formal learning;
• Extending user profiles to support connections between users;

Using the menu and block system to simplify and streamline the navigation of your site.

For more specifics on information covered in this book, the Table of Contents gives a solid overview.

This screencast describes how to use Drupal to create a presentation portfolio within a class blogging platform. The portfolio functionality we describe here can be replicated in just about any Drupal site. While this screencast focuses on one user, this structure will work equally well for 10, 100, 1000, or 10,000 users. At the risk of stating the obvious, you will have different design needs at each of these levels, but the core structure will scale upwards as needed.

Note: For the full (and easier to see) video, download the original -- all 72M of it.

In setting up the portfolio, we look at these main areas:

Adding Content

Using this model, people in the site are doing their daily work, and adding content as they go. As people add content into the site (aka, blog) they create a body of information. Within this site, people can either upload content directly into the site, or embed content from external sources. The screencast provides more detail on this area.

Creating the Portfolio

In this section, we describe how to add pages into the portfolio, and how to organize content that has been added into the site.

Next Steps

These steps are not covered in the screencast, but are worthy of mention. The portfolio system shown in this screencast is a starting point. The Technical Notes section gives an overview describing how to build this tool, but the functionality described here can be added into any Drupal site. It will work with various types of Access control, and you can also set up a Workflow to create a feedback mechanism on portfolios. In short, the tools shown here provide a starting point for a broader range of functionality.

TechnicalNotes

Key modules used for the portfolio functionality:

• CCK: http://drupal.org/project/cck
• Link: http://drupal.org/project/link
• Filefield: http://drupal.org/project/filefield
• jQuery Media: http://drupal.org/project/jquery_media
• Embedded Media Field: http://drupal.org/project/emfield
• ImageCache: http://drupal.org/project/imagecache
• Imagefield: http://drupal.org/project/imagefield
• ImageAPI: http://drupal.org/project/imageapi
• Book Manager: http://drupal.org/project/book_manager
• Views: http://drupal.org/project/views

Tutorial on using Filefield and jQuery Media, from Sean Effel.
Theming tip on Filefield and jQuery Media, from Aaron Winborn.

The theme used in the screencast is the Pixture theme.

Screenshot of all modules used on the site (swf file, with download links).

Screenshot of permissions for the Book and Book Manager modules for users who are creating portfolios.

And, for those who just feel the need to download large files, feel free to grab the original video -- all 72M of it.