Present projects depending on their type and highlight ongoing projects (emergency mapping)

[xamanu]

I don't know what you think: But for visitors who want to get involved in one of the activations and arrive to the website it is almost impossible to understand which projects are really active.

How has this been handled until now? There is a checkbox on the projects that promotes it to the front page. Are all projects ongoing activations?

I would propose to highlight the really active projects, that need people to jump on, on the project page in a slightly different background or seperate them from the others with a suitable headline like "Get involved in this projects now" and "Long term projects" and maybe "Archived projects",.... something like that.

And on the frontpage we could make a more calling headline to the block of projects, like the first one in the projects overview page for the ongoing activations.

[xamanu]

There have been previous discussions at: hotosm/tech#7

There was the idea to make it with the flag module (which is now being used on the website) and could be perfectly used for this.

Or we thought it might be good to have a taxonomy to descibre different types for projects:

• Ongoing activation
• Archived activation
• Other projects
  ....

Can somebody brainstormy give some more types of possible projects? Maybe @mikelmaron or @wonderchook ?

[wonderchook]

I think we should use "activations" as activities in response to a crisis. There should also be "program projects" and "community projects". We'll need to define what that means somewhere in the site.

I envision the types for the above should also be: ongoing, future, past. That way someone can filter to see what is currently ongoing, coming up or already happened.

[xamanu]

Ongoing, future or past could be done by the use of a drop-down, which has to be changed when the state changes. Or a date field to specify start and end date (the second one is optional). I'd go for this solution, because this way we collect the information about the exact dates of the projects, at the moment of happening. This information is not held anywhere (the wiki is a little bit inconsistent).

[techlady]

A good way to handle it would be to have big "buttons" on the Home page that lead to the current activations. Obviously, the top one would be the most urgent activation. The buttons should be big enough that they would be readily visible to someone looking to join an effort, such as Nepal. Probably they should be on the right side. It should be easy to create, remove or change the order of buttons.
I don't like drop-downs because they would not be visible when someone lands on the page.
And we can't use the word "activations" because no one knows what it means but people already in HOT.
--Charlotte

[techlady]

As for Felix's four categories of projects, they look good to me. KISS.
--Charlotte

[xamanu]

Thanks for the input @techlady!!! I also agree that these activations should be very visible. There is a new graphic design in planning (#23) and I'd suggest to focus bigger visualization changes all together with this.

Let's focus here first on getting the technical base for categorizing the project implemented and visualize the ongoing activations as such. This is a relatively small improvement but should go into the right direction.

[techlady]

Yes, but don't use the word "activations." No one understands what that is. Use "emergency mapping." Better yet, just use the name of the current emergency, such as "Nepal Earthquake."

[xamanu]

@techlady 👍 makes absolutely sense.

[techlady]

I still like Felix's types of projects:
Community Development
Emergency Mapping
Technical Development
Am I missing one? I seem to remember that he had a fourth category and that it made sense to me.

[techlady]

Xamanu.

Let's finish with the basic outline before we start getting into how to do it graphically. Once we know what page headings we want, then we can come up with graphics.

[xamanu]

"Field deployment" was the forth category :)

[techlady]

How is the different from "Community Development"?

[russdeffner]

I would say that "Field Deployment" highlights more of the projects where HOT 'compensates' people for field work. Community Dev more like missing maps where HOT isn't directly financing anyone to go, but generally supporting the effort.

[wonderchook]

I would say "Field Deployment" isn't ideal calling is the "Field" is well...not great people live in that "Field". Also is it still a Field Deployment when people that live there are compensated to work on community development?

[russdeffner]

Agree Kate - and I think it is fine to join deployments in community dev.

[xamanu]

The communications working group proposed in today's meeting the following categories for projects:

• Disaster Mapping
• Community Development
• Technical Projects

And to use a date field for the information about past, ongoing or future projects,

[xamanu]

So, we know have two new fields on project nodes: "Project type" and "Timespan". I'd like to ask somebody go through all projects and fill in this information, so we can work on the visualization. Thank you!

[techlady]

Delix,

     It's Time Span, two words.

Charlotte

At 06:42 AM 5/19/2015, you wrote:

So, we know have two new fields on project
nodes: "Project type" and "Time Span". I'd like
to ask somebody go through all projects and fill
in this information, so we can work on the visualization. Thank you!

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Skype: thetechlady

[techlady]

Filling in all the information could take some time. Besides, I think only Tyler knows all the projects. I say we give this to him, at least to get started. Tyler should make up a list with the emails of the project coordinators. Then we ask each project coordinator to add some details, maybe giving them a suggested length, such as 100-125 words (about a quarter page).

[techlady]

By the way, how are we going to display the information about each project. A headline and a picture followed by a paragraph of text? Then a link to the project page (which will grow as each coordinator adds text and pictures)?

[xamanu]

@techlady, i fixed "time span". Thanks! Yes, Tyler offered to go through the projects. I'm going to send him an email.

[xamanu]

On the staging site I have a basic proposal separating the projects by type and by time (ongoing/archived): http://www.dev.hotosm.org/projects (user/password is "hotosm")

[russdeffner]

Looking good - I would suggest we 'chop' the text - maybe just the first paragraph or even just a 'learn more' link. I think once we have all the tech projects also on the page, we'll be a bit crunched for space; so maybe also smaller image/icons?

[xamanu]

Makes sense. I just cut off the whole description text and made the titles bigger. I like it a lot more now. If there are no objections, I would proceed and deploy this online.

[xamanu]

This is now live. 👍

[xamanu]

There is also now a short entrance to ongoing activations on the end of the emergency mapping introduction page: http://hotosm.org/emergency-mapping