What makes a beautiful street, or a pleasant neighborhood? Maybe that's hard to define, but can you tell a beautiful place from somewhere that’s not so hot?

Beautiful Streets is a project from OpenPlans. It’s an experiment: we’re trying out a different way to evaluate places, called pairwise surveys, as popularized by the fantastic All Our Ideas. We’re also testing out some neat interface ideas, and learning about the use of Street View in evaluating places for urban planning projects.

With your help, we’ll compare 200 randomly-selected streets in Philly and ask which one in each pair is more beautiful. We expect this experiment will produce some neat data, which you’ll be able to download here soon.

Try it out, and let us know what you think via @OpenPlans or here.

Installation

Development

For local development, from the command line, install the requirements:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Fill in the settings:

$ # From street_score/project/settings/ ...
$ cp local.py.template local.py
$ <editor> local.py

Initialize the database:

$ # From street_score/ ...
$ python manage.py syncdb --all  # Create a superuser too

Start the server:

$ python manage.py runserver

Deployment

Deployment to DotCloud and Heroku are straightforward. First, follow the respective platform's instructions for setting up the project (all of the required) files should already be available in the repository).

Add the following environment variables to the system:

STREETSCORE_DB_NAME
STREETSCORE_DB_USER
STREETSCORE_DB_PASS
STREETSCORE_DB_HOST
STREETSCORE_DB_PORT

On Heroku you would use heroku config:add STREETSCORE_DB_...=..., and on DotCloud, dotcloud var set <application> STREETSCORE_DB_...=.... For other services, refer to the documentation.

Initializing Data

Before you can run surveys, you need points and a question in the database. You can add places one at a time or in bulk. In your browser, go to the admin page for Places (e.g.: http://localhost:8000/admin/project/place/ ). In the top right of the page there are buttons for adding data.

The application currently has support for one question at a time. To set the question, browse to the admin for Criteria (e.g.: http://localhost:8000/admin/project/criterion/ ). By default the model will expect something to finish the statement "Which street is more _____?". To change the format of the prompt, you will have to edit the index.html template.

Now you should be able to start submitting surveys!

Site Settings

Through the admin interface, you can set the title of the site, the Google analytics key, and the AddThis credentials so that visitors can easily share the site.