CityGroups

Experimental project

This is a sandbox project, which contains experimental code for developer use only.

CityGroups is a public directory of community groups for your city. We are actively working on this installation profile as a "Data-Wiki" and aim to foster a series of community sprints to develop this project further in 2011-2012.

What & Why

In cities across the country, there is amazing work being done by community organizers to mobilize their neighbors and take on community problems.

CityGroups is a searchable public directory which allows community organizers and residents to find community groups so that they can work together.

Like a wiki, city staffers and community members can contribute and retrieve the data in the system. The goal is to promote and assist smaller, less-visible groups who do important work but require modern tools to publicize it.

CityGroups will help them work together and work better.

Uses

The main goal of the site is to allow city residents to find community groups working for the public good, organized by topic and location. The groups have a service area that can be drawn on a map. Like a wiki, authenticated users can edit any entry. The community can flag groups as inactive, recommended, duplicates.

Development

The site is definitely not perfect yet - and we are reaching out to Drupallers in different cities to help tackle this project.

The project is under active development as a project that is part of Code for America, summer 2011. If you would like to help make this a reality in your city, drop us a line.

Paper Issue Queue cards

We will do a fairly radical activity with our issue queue, which involves putting certain issues on hand-written cards and having people literally hold on to them. Some of these tasks will be more about content, and most of that activity will be handled on github (probably.) This is something that Calagator developers did, and it worked well, so we shall try it too.

Technical

Technically CityGroups is intended to be an installation profile that is easy to set up for different cities, either through a hosted multi-site version on http://citygroups.org, or as an independently hosted instance.

* The site uses a lot of features and a handful of custom modules.
* The importing of CSV files is handled with Feeds & Views Datasource
* The mapping is a combination of geofield, openlayers and some custom usages of a JSON view with Leaflet.
* The community voting is handled with Flag.
* There is a special 'sub-site' module that allows for custom-themed data collection projects.
* There are a bunch of views, and one main content type - community group.
* There is a data-standard for the community groups.

Demo Sites

Future Cities

Planning to set CityGroups up for these cities - and more (one step at a time...)

Philadelphia
Boston
Bay Area

Code

Note: most of this is hosted on github, we will be moving parts of the project to be hosted in drupal.org & creating a drush make script and separate out the third party libraries. And we will move parts of the issue queue to drupal.org where appropriate.