Yauchi Truffino is a New Yorker who lives in a small, vibrant community in Queens. Like most neighborhoods, she knows some people in the community and not others. She has three kids in public school, and is somewhat involved with their activities.
As her kids grow and become more independent, Yauchi has become more concerned with how to keep them safe on streets that seem more perilous. The neighborhood is at risk of more development and the schools are already crowded. Over the last few years, she has personally witnessed some traffic accidents and near misses and has become frustrated by how ineffective her complaints have been. Yauchi would certainly join efforts with groups working on issues such as lack of crossing guards, speeding drivers, double parked cars at school pick up and dismissal, if only she knew how. Whenever an incident occurs, Yauchi wants to pursue a complaint but after about 20 minutes of researching how and to whom, she gets dismayed and tables the notion.
While she waits for her son at Karate class, she gets into a conversation with another mother about traffic and school safety, and the mom shows her the "Road Scholar" website, which she discovered at a PTA meeting at her kid's school.
They punch in Yauchi's zip code, and the map focus's on her area and all the schools, after-school programs and UPK's that are located nearby.
She can see enrollment numbers, and the locations of crossing guards in the area.
She can also see information for the local precinct, community board and elected officials. With this, it will be very easy for Yauchi to register some of the school safety concerns that she has.
Aside from the map, there are four main buttons.
Fix school safety pedestrian issues - may connect to webforms for NYC 311 (not sure it's possible) Rant & Rave - a listserve where people can discuss particular complaints Updates on popular topics- This could be info from the department of transportation, the department of education and NYPD on what has changed or been modified in their area.
Thanks for the detailed persona. It's great that you've thought about the way to publicize the site based on its target audience (through PTA meeting, etc.)
Regarding the scope, we'll need to narrow it down. It's still too big. For example, the "Rants & Rave" will be an independent site. Here're a few suggestions:
Focus on developing the map
This means gathering, cleaning, and processing the data. As we have discussed in previous conversations, the dataset for the map will be coming from multiple sources. Here are the data fields I see from your description. Could you add link you've found to each dataset, or note that it will be collected by yourself? (I filled in a few as an example. An elaborate map/site as you suggested calls for equally elaborate data. )
Refresh/learn CartoDB
Tool-wise, I think you'll have larger flexiblity using CartoDB (which you can also use to check out shapefiles, aka .shp) The
school namedataset has zipcode and school districts, on which you can join other data. The goal of listing all the datasets is to find a way to join them in a map. I can help if you need a refresher on joining data, but you are responsible for getting the data in place. Once you have a working dataset in CartoDB, I/Conrad can make the map interactive using CartoDB's API.Table the other functions of the site
They are independent of the map, and will require a lot of design and build time. We don't have that luxury in this class. This does not mean these are bad ideas -- they are just not within the scope, given the map will be complicated enough. Knowing how to come up with an appropriate scope is one of the goals of the class!
Let's talk this week to clarify these points.