SusTiki

to check out the project:

shell> svn co file:///svn/sustiki

Iteration one¶

Abstract: Sustiki offers users the ability to publish their ideas into a global forum as well as view the ideas of others in order to connect and collaborate with fellow activists interested in sustainable projects. Sustiki also offers a rating system for proposed new projects to gauge public opinion on future development. Sustiki allows users to search and participate in projects both in currently in progress as well as those planned for the future.

Mockup: Two to three wireframe mockups of what the interface to the application will look like.
i28.tinypic.com/ztuigz.jpg
See sidebar for Site/App Map

The specific context into which we’re customizing this build a little is for the Campus Sustainability Movement here at UCSC. More specifically, this arose out of the idea of making the Blue Print for a Sustainable Campus a living document rather than a compilation of meeting notes from the annual Earth Summit event put on by the Student Environmental Center. Each Earth Summit there are working groups which discuss various sustainability issues and then write up the notes, thereby creating the Blue Print for a Sustainable Campus. The overall purpose of the Blue Print is to get people into some next steps and into a working groups aimed at achieving those steps. However, the many challenges of an event during a school day, limited capacity, exclusive timing, and non-expert make up of the people who do show up, drastically decrease the validity and effectiveness of this document. So during some planning an idea came up to make this digital, like a wiki, so that information can be stored and documented in a way that is independent of schedule, location, or availability.

However, that did not address the issue of validity, so the “voting” feature was added to our idea. This allows for ideas to rise up if they’re popular or good. And while this does not take into account feasibility, it at least allows room for experts to make comments and give their input, independent of time and location availability challenges.

So Sus(tainability)Tiki was born. It has three main visual parts to it that represent the living document n(represented by a tree):
1) The Past (represented by the roots) – this is what has been done before to make sure that before people embark on an idea that they don’t recreate what has already been done. And the more information about who, where, why, how, and how much, etc., are really important so that people can build on what has come before.
2) The Present (represented by the trunk) – this category holds the information of what is happening currently; who is working on what projects when where and how, how to get involved, what their goals are and how they’re organized, all of this information is relevant and helps people get involved.
3) The Future (represented by leaves) – are the many ideas anyone can have for projects they’d like to do or ones they’d like to see get done. We figured that it would be unfair to strike down or regulate peoples ideas so we decided that no ideas can be deleted, unless by the original poster or by a webmaster for inappropriate content. However, these ideas, which we’re calling ‘Tikis’, will have voting mechanisms attached to them along with a place for comments. The idea is that the best or most popular ideas will rise to the top, thereby showing public opinion and/or feasibility (assuming that experts leave comments blessing or denouncing ideas).

THE INTERFACE
The basic navigation of the site takes place through a search engine. A user searches the site either by keywords, category, or tags.
- by keyword is the traditional search feature which just looks for keywords in all text
- by category searches by general categories like transportation, energy, etc.,
- by tags means by the tags that people can assign to any tiki, labelling their own tikis. next to the search button will be a drop down of all the tags possible by users. (we might have more than one of these so that people can cross reference more than one tag.

No matter how the search happens, in terms of by category, tag, or keyword, a standardized display of 1)Past 2)Present 3)Future will display the top search results, accordingly. (In the Past and Present categories, searches will probably show up in alphabetical order, but the Future part results will show up by most votes.)

THE META

Currently going on projects, under the Present category, we’ll encourage people to put in information about all the details of where and how their project is being run, who runs it, how to get in touch, and how to plug in. Eventually, in the Present part, as the user is checking out a project, we will have an option to link up with a project or take an existing idea and try to execute on it. It might be as simple as getting a sign-up sheet – perhaps with an RSS feed or a listserve, or it might be as detailed as connecting to something like BaseCamp and running a project from there.

Narrative:
1. User comes to site ‘Homepage’, thinks it’s pretty neat. Clicks search box in top right corner, enters search terms. New page – ‘Search Results’. Click on link to read more about a result. New page – ‘Project’: Project title, info, creator, participant list, date created, comments, vote, link to request joining project, tag list. Users can also browse by 4 main categories: An archived list of past projects, a list of current projects,a list of project ideas, or by the looking at all the tags created by users so far, in alphabetical order.
2. User clicks ‘join’ (either on front page or project page), routed to new page – ‘Sign Up for an Account’. User signs up. Clicks ‘Create Project’. Adds Project info, creator, participant list, date created, comments, vote, link to request joining project, tag list.

Tasks:

• user authentication/account: suzi and alex (almost finished 6/8)
• Ui, Logos & Buttons: Cameron
• Tagging: Alex (simple version completed as of 5/29), Mary
• Search function/tagging: Alex (simple version completed as of 5/27)
• Voting function: Vlad & Cameron
• Wiki functionality for ‘tikis’: Suzi (done on 6/11)
• HTML/CSS: Cameron and suzi

(wishlist)

• user stuff
  • Different levels of users (admin/reg. users/groups)
  • Make it so that if you’re logged in, Sustiki automatically recognized you and adds your name to the ‘creator’ field.
• voting
  • Make sure that users only get one vote per tiki
  • Make it so that the highest votes always show up at the top
• Create the 3 categories: Past, Present, Future
  • Make sure that projects are classified as one of the three categories (‘drop down box’)
  • Each tiki can only have 1 category assigned to it