Welcome to Livable Streets 1.0 (powered by OpenPlans 0.9.9.9.9.0.11 — just kidding).
Overview: We’re aiming to create high-profile, national-level epicenter for the burgeoning Livable Streets movement. As Ben wrote on Streetsblog this week, transportation will likely become a big issue in the coming year, and the timing is just right to build on growing local interest around the country. Looking ahead to the reauthorization of the federal transportation bill in 2009, the Livable Streets Network could be the initiative that ties grass-roots community organizing to national transportation policy in a meaningful way, something that has never happened before.
As the development team has been working on shoring up Opencore & Streetsblog for the Livable Streets release (aka “Woonerf”) the design and Livable Streets teams have been busy thinking through broader identity issues. It’s been an ongoing process, and we’ve been testing out ideas along the way (e.g, the shift from “NYCstreets” to “YourStreets”). Finally, we’ve arrived at a good place, and the following is an overview of the vision, including what will be necessary to make it happen.
While the following is an ambitious plan, I’m confident that we’ll be able to see it through, and that moving in this direction is the right thing to do. So, without further adieu…
Questions to be answered:
Here are some of the questions that we’ve been mulling over, along with the answers that we’ve come up with to address them:
What is “The Livable Streets Network” and how do we explain it?
The Livable Streets Network is an extension of the community that has developed around Streetsblog, Streetfilms, and the NYCSR. Our efforts have been enormously successful here in NYC, and the broad and dedicated readership shows that there’s significant demand for more around the country. To quote from a recent grant proposal:
“I believe that Streetsblog has transformed advocacy in New York…. By creating a well-informed, highly motivated constituency, the blog has done more to strengthen advocacy for progressive transportation planning than almost any recent comparable development.”
- Jasper Goldman, Senior Policy Analyst, Municipal Art Society
To build on that success, we will expand Streetsblog & co. to become the Livable Streets Network, where interested citizens, activists, and officials can participate by getting the latest news, adding to the collective knowledge base, and organizing around local and national issues.
For TOPP, the Livable Streets Network will be an opportunity to showcase all of our initiatives in one place — the reporting and advocacy of Streetsblog and Streetfilms, the community organizing tools of OpenPlans, and the geospatial capabilities of GeoServer.
To get down to specifics, centering our efforts around the Livable Streets Network will mean refocusing our branding and building our sites on livablestreets.com.
For example:
A homepage for The Livable Streets Network would explain our mission and showcase our various sites, possibly highlighting recent or featured content, while inviting people to participate in whatever ways are possible.
Technical requirements:
- Moving operations to livablestreets.com
- Designing a new homepage for the LSN (static for now, dynamic in the future) — just a redesign of sputnik/home.pt
- Moving the existing yourstreets homepage template to /projects (see below)
What does that mean for user accounts and profiles?
In thinking these ideas through, we kept bumping up against the issue of user accounts and profiles, and how to tie them to the rest of the sites in a way that makes sense. For example, having “yourstreets” or “nycstreets” as an identity provider for Streetsblog (via Vacuum), Streetswiki and Wiki Maps makes sense to us, but doesn’t from an outsider’s perspective.
Thinking about identity in terms of The Livable Streets Network makes entirely more sense. Want to edit a Streetswiki page? Login to your Livable Streets account. Adding a point to a wiki map? Login to the Livable Streets Network first. etc., etc.
For example:
and:
Technical requirements:
- None
If logins and registrations are at the Livable Streets level, what does that mean for projects?
Good question. I think the answer is “not much”, except that, visually, projects will fall under their own tab/section, separate from registration and people.
Relatedly, the term “Project” has been problematic for quite some time — it’s always seemed a bit overwhelming, like too serious a commitment, and we’ve been looking for a replacement for a while now. For Livable Streets, the term that we’ve settled upon is “Groups”. OpenPlans really is groupware, and in the context of the LSN, “start a group on LivableStreets.com” rolls off the tongue nicely.
For example:
and:
Technical requirements:
- Renaming the “projects” namespace to “groups”: livablestreets.com/groups/mygroup
- Finding and replacing any references to “projects” in our language
- Conditional templating to highlight the “groups” tab only while viewing a group
- (eventually): url rewriting like mygroup.livablestreets.com
How do maps fit in?
We’ve been trying to figure out how to feature maps in a way that sufficiently highlights this awesome new feature. Recently, we removed Maps from the global navigation, since our first map is NYC-specific. However, the feature really deserves top-billing and we want to work it back in.
The solution we’ve come up with is to include a top-level Maps section, which will be the home of an ever-growing collection of community-driven maps, the first of which is the NYC-Fix-It Map (aka NYMap).
For example:
and:
Conclusion
So, that’s about it. As I said, this will be an ambitious effort, but it’s one that’s central to our goal, and is necessary for things to, you know, make sense.
Starting next week (week of 3/3), I’d like to pair a developer and a designer together to outline the work and get started. While there aren’t any huge elements here (with the possible exception of re-namespacing Projects; I’m not sure) there are a lot of small details to cover, so this will require some focused attention.