[portland] Meeting for New Urban Edibles Website

[Michael Schurter]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 12:18 AM, Michael Bunsen<notbot at gmail.com> wrote:
> New Website Brainstorm & Planning Meeting for Urbanedibles.org
>
> When: Sunday July 12th, 3pm
> Where: Backspace (115 NW 5th Ave)
>
> We have been envisioning a new website for a long while and it's time
> to make it happen. The current site is was built using Rails 3 years
> ago, but since then I have become a full-time Pythoneer and am leaning
> towards Django for the next urbanedibles.org
>
> We have lots of ideas for new features, including opening it up to all
> cities, searching for what's ripe now, submitting sources via
> SMS/Twitter, an API, iPhone app, etc. (Many at:
> http://wiki.urbanedibles.org/index.php?title=New_Feature_Ideas)
>
> This will be a very open meeting, but I would like to come out of it
> with some specific problems and tasks that need to be tackled. I think
> this could be a great community coding project that could follow in
> the foot steps of Calagator and their development process
> (http://code.google.com/p/calagator/w/list).
>
> Urban Edibles has gained a lot of momentum and international press
> over the last few years and I would love to see it fulfill the many
> requests we've had for expansion.
>
> If you are interested in collaborating but can't make it to the
> meeting, please send me an email. I have been the only C.S. focused
> person on the team thus far (others work on education, leading plant
> walks, publishing, etc.) There are needs for graphic design,
> interaction design, mapping/GIS, javascript, scaling, API design,
> social media integration, clustering...the list can be as long as we
> are willing to make it.

Argh, can't make it because I'm moving cross-town this weekend!  Would
love to make it to a future sprint though.

Django seems like the right choice for a mix of technical and social reasons:

 - "proven" (popular sites use it)
 - GIS integration via PostGIS & GeoDjango
 - basic social networking features via Pinax
 - significant mindshare and positive growth in the web development community
 - has a conference coming to town in September for you to demo at! ;-)

So while thats just my $0.02, it might be a more productive meeting if
you decided on Django ahead of time and laid out some immediate
implementation goals (like: get feature X working).

At any rate please keep posting meetings to this mailing list.  I'd
love to write some code for it in the future!

Michael Schurter
@schmichael on twitter @ irc