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January 29, 2006
Iteration 10 is up
Hi everybody. In a break in our schedule yesterday (today, I forget, been v busy!!) I managed to put iteration 10 up on the public and UAT instances.
I'd love to tell you what's in this instance but GPI has been away since last Friday and won't be back for a few more days yet. I'll see if I can get one of the ThoughtWorks lads or Rolf to post about what this iteration contains.
Finally, a warm welcome to Carlos and Dale of Thoughtworks who come to the project to help us with it's final stages and goodbye for now to Peter who joins Paul in returning to the US to work on other projects.
Posted by xeightee at 10:20 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 23, 2006
Connecting the dot orgs
Last week was a busy week, taking the opportunity to talk to several organisations on the way to, and at the eCampaigning Forum at Oxfam GB's office. Presenting more or less sneak previews to colleagues in Brussels at Greenpeace Belgium, the Climate Action Network Europe and Friends of the Earth Europe, in London to OneWorld International, ending with the presentation to e-campaigners of many organisations and other interested folks in Oxford.
To stay in tune with the current more technical nature of this blog: we're finding ways to narrow our approach of open source campaigning into a kind of agile development of campaigning methods.
It's an exciting phase, as we're finding out how well our current version triggers the imagination of the campaigners we hope to get on board. In its essence, the site sure does cater for the need of many campaigners to work with local groups, and to take an approach where you continuously look for bottlenecks for growth of your constituency, and reorganise your approach to push responsible to groups and individuals. Agile campaigning.
Similar principles apply as in agile software development: many questions are of the nature "what if...", and in most cases, we have given those issues some thought already, but... YAGNI, "you ain't gonna need it", we'll deal with those if they turn out to become real issues. We're just making sure that our general thinking is one step further than what we're doing, so we're anticipating, but not spending more resources on it.
Rosalyn from MoveOn explained how they have mastered this art of agile activism: campaigners on the US East Coast think of possible actions, quickly test them on their audience, find out the general reaction within an hour or so. Then the communication people on the US West Coast work on the message and the tools needed. Those are built in Japan and Europe, so when the campaigners wake up again, the action can start. For instance, gathering shelter places for Hurricane Katrina victims within one or two days.
It reinforced my belief in our approach, and so we're continuing along the lines of "the movement as a network" and try to connect the dot orgs in our effort to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius.
Posted by rolf at 1:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Custard Melt Launch Event
On Friday we headed for the Said Business School to launch Custard Melt on an unsuspecting world. The choice of venue wasn't random, the eCampaigning Forum was happening down the road meaning we could attract online campaigners from a broad spread of NGOs to see what we're doing.
The agenda was a straightforward one. Charlie Kronick from GP UK talked about the difficulties associated with coalition campaigning on climate change issues, in particular his experience with the Stop Climate Chaos coalition. For me the key takeaway from Charlie's talk was about the need to move climate change from being an issue talked about by small numbers of experts, in technical terms, in obscure meetings and make it something millions of people can understand and engage with.
Duncan from Thoughtworks briefly presented the agile development methodology (while saying some very nice things about Greenpeace). It was nice to be able to talk about the flexibility the methodology (and Django) gave us, especially when answering questions later on about future plans and 'does it do this?' type issues.
Finally, Rolf gave a guided tour of the demo version. I'm still getting used to working with Custard, but the ability to bounce around the system, setting up events, joining things together and adding keywords is truly impressive.
Questions focused on future development, branding, marketing, usability and questions about how ambitious we want to be, that kind of thing. Post event discussion threw up one idea that's got my mind racing. Multiple instances of Custard could syndicate content to each other based on keyword. So, if someone created a 'Fair Trade' website using Custard content from there including keywords like 'climate change' or 'emissions' could be consumed automatically by Melt, while content on Melt labelled 'WTO' or 'development' could go the other way.
The presentations can be found in the SVN repository.
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 9:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 20, 2006
Iteration 9 is up
We've been a little busy preparing our first organised public presentation but the next iteration has now been tagged and the public melt instance upgraded.
This iteration includes a lot of cleaning up under the hood and also appears to have eliminated a problem we have been seeing with Internet Explorer (related to caching). Also it includes plotting of search results on the Google Maps map and the ability to hide the map for people on slower connections.
Wish the guys luck in Oxford today with their presentation!
Posted by xeightee at 1:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 17, 2006
Iteration 08a is up - Google Maps go go go!
So, a few hours ago I let iteration 8 out of the bag. It's a little late, we've been hacking our way through dense forest undergrowth, scaling massive mountains and fighting giant monsters... or rather we'd like an excuse like that but in reality we just got a little side-tracked.
Iteration 8 was delivered on time last week but we found a couple of minor problems with the Google Maps (specifically relating to the keys needed for use). These were then fixed but we got caught up in discussions about iteration 9 and quite simply didn't get around to updating the public instance of Melt - sorry! The 8a signifies that we had to fix some little things.
Iteration 8 comes with the first version of Google Maps integration allowing you to specify locations using the maps. Iteration 9 that we're working on takes the Google Maps further still showing markers for the search results and fixes an issue with Internet Explorer.
Unfortunately Google Maps data is restricted to certain places like the UK and the US but we have data for latitude/longitude of countries (courtesy of the CIA Fact Book) and lots of other data that we are seeing if we can integrate with our Google Maps implementation.
Wish us luck, see you at the next iteration!
Posted by xeightee at 4:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 12, 2006
Things to do with Custard
We're far enough into the project now that we can start to think about what it's useful for beyond it's immediate purpose. A few ideas are already percolating and I'm sure there's every chance that there are many more we haven't thought of...
At Greenpeace we've realised that Custard might be a very useful thing to use as a supporter extranet. Allowing our local supporters to find each other, band together and share ideas and such. Meanwhile the 'authenticated user' features would allow mean actual Greenpeace employees could contribute and be recognised for who they are. Not bad for a fringe benefit.
Going back to my old business school for a launch event has also made me realise that something like this might help business school alumni manage their organisations. Chapters (groups) can be formed and tied to a location, you can see at a glance who else is there and when as an alumni you pitch up in a new city it's a matter of moments to see who (or what) else is going on there. When someone comes up with an exciting new idea creating an online discussion around it could be very quick indeed.
Indeed any geographically disperse community could find it useful. Think the Boy Scouts, Avon Sales Reps,
As the granularity of our location data improves (and here we're largely reliant on third parties) other uses become easier. City guides, or even online city communities would be straightforward. A gig guide would be an easy place to start.
For some of the more controlled communities (alumni, sales reps etc) you might want to enhance Custards ability to interrupt people with messages that say 'You should be interested in this'...
Custard - it goes with anything...
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 4:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Iteration 8 en Route
Iteration 8 will be along shortly. Last week we allocated 20 points to getting Google Maps integration up and running, which was enough to do that, but not quite enough to make it functional and useful.
We'll be tagging and releasing Iteration 8 just as soon as we've finished the initial Google Story. Incidently if anyone knows when/if Google are planning on adding location data for places beyond the USA, Japan and the UK we'd love to know. To see what I mean take a look here.
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 10, 2006
Launch Event
On the 20th of January we will be holding a launch event for Custard Melt at the Said Business School in Oxford University. This is less a full blown bells and whistles event where the curtain will be drawn back on the finished item than an opportunity for us to talk at length, in person about what we've done, why we're doing it and how folks can get involved.
As an audience we're looking forward to seeing the attendees of the eCampaigning Forum, under whoose kind auspices we're organising the event, as well as any interested parties from among the very many interesting parties who populate the business school.
20th January, Oxford, 6 till 7 PM. If you're interested in coming and aren't either attending the eCampaigning Forum or connected with the university leave a comment.
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 1:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Adventures in Agile : Part 3 : The Joy of Automation
Here at Greenpeace we have a lot of systems, most of which I'd cheerfully describe as 'Legacy'. With them comes an awful lot of other legacy things, mostly their development environments.
It's best practice for development to have at least three instances of any software you're running. the live version, the development version and the staging or testing version. For some of our systems setting up a new version is a mountain of work, several weeks of work for one of our systems. Others have been left without separate instances for so long that creating a new one is almost impossible. With Melt things are a little different...
I think we have five instances of Melt running at the moment. This morning we decided to introduce another one, to use as our demonstration instance for our forthcoming launch event (see next post for details). We'll also be adding another one so we can implement a new look and feel without getting in the way of development. Adding another instance means running a single one line script.
It was, needless to say, a bit of effort to get this stuff set up in the first place. Our official 'Iteration 0' when you're supposed to do this took three days. In practice we've been tweaking the setup ever since. But in the final analysis this is much less effort than attempting to create and synchronise even a handful of instances without the automated procecess.
Having this kind of environment available is a pre-requisite for agile development. The developers need a development instance. The customer needs an instance which shows the latest work the developers have checked in so they can offer feedback and input. The testers need an instance which shows the work ready for user acceptance testing - the UAT instance. We also have our public instance, which shows the last signed off iteration to the world at large.
It's not just the automation of the instance creation that makes it such a keystone of agile practices though. The automation of testing saves days of time, and most importantly means that when changes to one part of the system introduce bugs elsewhere we catch them sooner rather than later.
I'm sure other development methodologies would benefit from similar levels of automation, and probably do. As far as I know Microsoft aren't agile, but they do do daily builds for all their software development. If there's a key to all of this it's probably this. If you have to do something once, do it yourself, if you have to do it twice, get the machine to do it.
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 11:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 8, 2006
Read access to the Subversion repository for the public
First things first: to access our Custard Subversion repository directly you need the following details:-
URL : https://svn.greenpeace.org/repositories/custard/ user: public pass: None, just press enter/return when challenged
So, what's changed and why?
While surfing Google I came across a django chat log page where this project was mentioned. Great I thought!
... or not. Unfortunately it took this completely accidental discovery to realise that read access for anyone to the Custard repository required a username and password. This was not initially setup like this but we had to reinstall our Subversion server a while ago and though public read access was still configured in Subversion it was sadly blocked by another configuration setting in Apache.
My apologies to iholsman and anybody else frustrated by the lack of tarball download via ViewVC combined with the inability to access the repository directly. The latter at least is now fixed by making the username and password known.
I'll look at making the repository accessible without username/password (complicated by the configuration of our other repositories), and I'll also look at tarball support.
Posted by xeightee at 4:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 6, 2006
Looking good?
It's about this time in a project when we should start thinking about not just how a site should function, but how we want it to look.
So, use this as an open thread to talk about how we want the site to look.
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 11:45 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
What's new in Iteration 7?
Iteration 7 was our small, but perfectly formed Christmas release. Needless to say it bounded up the web charts, only to be kept from Number 1 by the new BoyZone single. So, what might you have missed?
Once you've set a location in your profile the homepage will now promote content in your area to you alongside the most popular global content
We've added pagination to our search results. This turned out to be more complex than we thought because of the tabbed nature of the search results themselves.
One thing that slipped a bit was allowing users to replace files they've uploaded to the system. The idea being that you can fix your typos, get the latest version or whatever without losing all the links and connections that have attatched themselves to whatever you posted in the first place.
Iteration 8 is going to be a full blooded affair, as we return to our ration of 40 points a week. Things to look forward to are auto-tagging of content and suggestions of suitable tags to add to content you have contributed. We're also upping our web 2.0 quotient by integrating a mapping interface into the system.
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 5, 2006
Iteration 7 is up
Just a quick note to say that iteration 7 was today tagged and the public melt instance at http://melt.staging.greenpeace.org/ was upgraded to iteration 7.
Posted by xeightee at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 3, 2006
Back for the new year
We're back for the new year. Over the Christmas break we've been trying to make our way through iteration 7, which is going to be half the size of our normal weekly iteration.
After that it's back to rapid development. Our spreadsheet says we're two thirds of the way through the required functionality. Not bad for six weeks of work.
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack