Not that there is A JSON representation of the map that might be useful towards
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Iām able to access the map in private mode (ie not logged in), but then i cannot add an event.
Is this good or bad? I can imagine we rather want to know who is contributing data, also in terms of the GDPR and a privacy policy and explicit consent to publish the data as pubilc domain.
I can also imagine scenarios in which we would like to allow anonymous contributions. How about you?
Yes, we want that everybody can participate on the global degrowth day - not only members of the community. If we decide, the event organizers have to maintain the events themselves in the map, then we donāt want to force them to register first.
I find this contradictory. If you want people to maintain their own events on the map, then they should definitely have an account for doing it. Otherwise how do you determine ownership of an event?
Of course we could alternatively have a wiki-like map where any anonymous user could edit any point. But what problem is this solving? Why is it a problem for a person organizing an event to register on an open platform on degrowth?
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we were not decided to go that way. Our goal is to make all events visible. If it is a map within agora is only one way you suggested to solve this!
We want to make it as easy as possible to register an event. We already know a few people who donāt like to register on forums. And only for making an event public, I think it is not acceptable to force them to do so.
There is nothing impeding to have an anonymous submission of events. There is already the form to submit, which requires then someone to do it manually on some map. Or we can have an email address where anyone can send an event to, that will appear on the events automatically (but probably not directly on the map, for this some moderator would need to go through to add it).
We can also just use a public umap to allow anyone to add points without restrictions. I am however concerned that this not help in simplifying the process.
Thanks for the infos.
totally fine for make Anne and Arndt also administrator!
Ciao Jean
Hi @Anne_Arndt_Jacobi and @jean,
can we conclude here that there is a separate discussion happening around how we do mappings of degrowth, either them being mere locations, or also events, taking place here?
For me it is important to collect your use specifications and transform them into workable technical requirements. Some are directly transferable, others need to be rescoped and be put into context. We know that it is nice and easy to think of the features that we want, but we must also take into account the available resources and the available expertise. Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.
If you can propose a free and libre open source software mapping environment that meets your requirements, we are happy to deploy it immediately. Until then we need to improvise one step after the other, and do not want to be blocked, if initially requirements were estimated too high.
Which benefits would you see in allowing anonymous contributions and editing, and how much of our collective effort seems reasonable to achieve this?
Jean, what do you want to make Anne and Arndt an administrator of? I did not perfectly get the context.
I was proposing to give them the same rights that I have on Agora and clouds to help when I could not been able to work. Concerning the map I propose to Ann and arndt to have a phone call on whatsapp and talk a bit. Then maybe we could have a call together with jon if there are some doubts.
Tomorrow mornning I am available.
Ok?
Jean
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Hi,
Iāll try to summarize:
first idea was to have an automatism which puts our form data on a map automatically. From the above I conclude that this is not so easy - correct me if I misinterpret the above statements.
Currently planned solution is: people fill out the form->an email is sent containing all relevant data in a structured format - we (eg Arndt and I and whoever else has time and energy and access to the email account )- manually put it on the umap we are using and displaying on the website. I think this is a workable solution for now. We can additionally display the event information in a structured way on the website - should hopefully not be too much work, we can do a little prototype in the next days. In addition to this we can think about automatically creating events in the forum. But we have to keep in mind that they will be kind of āsubeventsā of the event āglobal degrowth dayā, and there may be quite a lot of them (hopefully!), so Iām not sure if it is really useful to have them all in the forum - they should at least be grouped by country or similar, otherwise it will be very confusing. On the website we can (probably) do this more easily.
@Jean: we donāt have a smartphone and donāt use whatsapp - but we can of course talk on our ānormalā phone 
But maybe it makes more sense to discuss this once we have the prototype of the event list we could show you? But if you want to talk tomorrow, thatās also fine. Our no is xxx. What time would be good for you?
That sounds good.
I will follow up about the rest later.
I confirm concerning the semi-automatism that it does not work now.
I understand your plan. However why letās people directly fill the map creating their own events? They have just to log in and filā¦very easy as filling a form and for us is no work! cliking on this link: https://agora.degrowth.net/c/events/global-degrowth-day-2019/l/map
That your time and when ready you can call me: ā¦
See you!
Jean
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I totally support this workflow. I donāt see how it is more complex than anonymous publishing on umap (which has a much more complex interface). And we motivate people to join our network by themselves, helping to build up our networking capacity, which is a very important long-term positive effect.
@gandhiano, @yala, @jean: we produced a document https://cloud.degrowth.net/s/EHP3TTpnY6Btq65, where we tried to summarize our specification for this topic. We also made a little analysis of different approaches.
This is not a final document. So maybe there are more or other requirements, not listed here now.
Feel free to enhance and comment it.
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Many thanks for the work. What do you prefer?
Personally maybe the mixed approach but not collecting data in the 2 side. Just the automatic map with the possiiblity of some of you to correct things and maybe by email to speak and help people that do not arrive t post the event or that have to change location.
Than I would do the list of events manually. Lazy people will not organize events. I would not care for them but I would care of error/crazy people that need help
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Thanks for your analysis @Anne_Arndt_Jacobi, thatās really helpful in understanding the possibilities and limitations of the new mapping feature of Agora.
I would like at some point to transform them into wishful stories/feature requests and maybe some can still be improved for the picnic, while others can be part of future improvements. The most annoying I find is the inability to search for a specific town, although I donāt know how many people really will search for a town when they are looking at a map of events. We could however probably circumvent this by adding a tag with the town, or including the town name in the event description as well.
I think altogether the maps/events in Agora offer a good starting point for organizing community events and would be great to have the Picnic as a first experience. As @jean mentioned, complementing it with a clear ācontact lineā via the global day e-mail for people who find problems submitting directly to it (or registering in the platform or whatever comes) should be enough to address the difficulties, while saving a lot of time to organize things.
Please remember that this is open source software with a community of developers behind. We can not only improve it, but submit our issues and feature requests to the developers of the plugin. They are usually very happy to know what their users would like to have
Hey yāall,
these are very fine considerations that I find in the document linked above. Indeed it becomes clear that we must distinguish between the functionalities and possibilities that the softwares provide that we have, and which of the specifications mean additional work to be done by us, or third-parties.
For me it would be helpful if you could share a timeline of planned preparation phases up until the picnic that outlines in which waves you wish to contact selected audiences. This relates loosely to what you stated in https://agora.degrowth.net/t/twitter-post-on-global-degrowth-day/236/7
As you can see, the case of participatory tempospatial mapping in a collaborative online environment is quite a hard nut to crack, which involves considerations around diverse functional and technical requirements, but also possibilities.
To ease the process of entering new locations/events to the categories which support such data, our belgian partners from IN COMMON are also using a wizard that guides the users through the different steps of getting their data. It is prepared to integrate with the locations plugin, and improvements are expected.
In his profile, the author of the location, events and witzard plugins states:
Iām now accepting paid gigs. Reach out to me if youād like to add functionality to one of my plugins, or add other features to your Discourse.
If we cannot solve some of the technical difficulties ourselves, we would be able to 
fast forward some of our requests with using the few monetary resources we have.
We can continue to develop some of the ideas here. @jean also requested a call, which he scheduled for 14.02. at 10.30. Please feel highly invited to join that occasion to talk together about this, and condense the requirements into a mutually acceptable form. From my point of view, the most important will be to distinguish between airy dreams that will remain wishes (for later developments), and concrete steps that we can implement right now.
Thanks to you all for wrapping your head around this problem-space, in so we come to define a useful and nice solution-space.
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