EMBARQ.org: Using Drupal's Translation Tools and Installer Profiles to Empower a Global Network
World Resource Institute's EMBARQ Program Moves to Drupal For Better Branding, Content Sharing, and Multilingual Content Producing
We recently launched a new website for a program at the World Resources Institute called EMBARQ, which works with cities in the developing world to implement sustainable transportation projects. Along with their base in Washington, DC, EMBARQ has independent centers with a few dozen staff in six countries, an audience speaking at least four languages, and great original multimedia content.
They needed a powerful new solution to feature their content and facilitate a decentralized content production and translation process that respected the uniqueness of each center in the network. They also wanted it to look incredible. We built a new website for them with Drupal and created a custom installer profile that allows each of their centers to quickly turn on their own customizable site, yet still benefit from the work of the entire network.
Part think tank and part nonprofit consultancy of sorts, EMBARQ works directly with governments from the municipal to the national level, as well as multi-national companies, to develop practical green transport projects. For instance, they’ve helped Mexico City develop a bus rapid transit system that’s an affordable mass transit alternative to building a subway system. They’re always trying to reach out to new partners and spread the impact of green transportation solutions around the world.
For several years, they’ve had their main site on a custom .NET CMS, two of their five centers outside the the United States had their own unconnected websites, and the other centers haven’t been online at all. This obviously created a problem for maintaining their messaging and branding across the network, not to mention the efficiency loss from users in different places not having a way to easily share content. For their new solution, since EMBARQ works in diverse regions with different transportation needs and concerns, it was important that each of the centers could communicate to their local and regional audiences in their own languages and with completely unique content.
Week in DC Tech: January 5 Edition
Art, Mobile Phones, and Open Government This Week in Washington
Happy New Years! We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and had a blast ringing in 2009. If you’re anything like us here at Development Seed, you have a lot you want to accomplish in the coming year. One thing every Washingtonian knows is that networking gets you far in this town. So start working on your 2009 professional goals this week by attending a technology meetup or two.
Here are a few events we’re hoping to catch, and you can find a full listing of the week’s events here.
Tuesday, January 6
7:00 pm
SEO Social 2.0: Do you want to push your organization’s website or Facebook page to the top of search rankings? Of course you do! Come out to this meetup to talk to people about how to best do this and to find out what else you should be doing as a website or brand manager.
Wednesday, January 7
Artomatic Happy Hour: Artomatic is one of the best local art shows in town, and we’re hoping their happy hours turn out to be almost as good. On top of the opportunity to meet and talk to local artists, this event will also feature the unveiling of the results of a scientific investigation into the correlations of casual drinking and creativity.
Thursday, January 8
3:00 – 5:00 pm
USAID Development 2.0 Challenge Awards Ceremony: Several months ago USAID and its Global Development Commons asked for innovative ways mobile phones could be used to impact development efforts. The winners have been announced, and this Thursday is your chance to meet them and see what ideas they came up with. Look for Eric if you go.
Happy Holidays!
And All the Best in 2009
Happy holidays! The team at Development Seed wishes you a very happy holiday and hopes you can spend some good time relaxing with family and friends over the next few days. To do just that ourselves, our office will be closed until January 5th. But we’re already excited to come back from a good break and kick off 2009 by working on some fun new projects with some great organizations.
Happy holidays, and see you in 2009!
Get Over the First Hump In Making Completely Custom, Beautiful Maps: Install Mapnik on Ubuntu
How To Install Mapnik on Ubuntu 7-8 with mod_python
As many of you read earlier on this blog, we released Nice Map as a bridge for Drupal to better communicate with WMS servers. Jeff gave a nod to NASA’s free server, which is a great source for beautiful surface imagery and an easy way to test WMS clients. However, the real benefit of mapping with WMS is that you can drop in any WMS-compliant server you like, and Nice Map and other clients will do the legwork of getting beautiful maps on your site. This opens up the possibility for completely custom, beautiful maps like we have on Stumble Safely – maps that can set your site apart from the masses of Google Maps and match the zaniest color schemes. The level of flexibility offered by the WMS protocol and servers is an incredible boon for anyone doing online maps. Here’s one example of a custom map we built with this.
This weekend Jeff, Alex, and Tim will be rehashing campaign strategies with the people who implemented them at Rootscamp DC. This is one of our favorite local events because it brings together a diverse group of people who’ve run the campaign strategy for politicians or progressive causes, have pounded the pavement on their behalf, or have built the technology that made their tactics possible.
Recently Development Seed has worked on a lot of tools that could be integrated into a campaign – maps, data visualizations, sms tools, and a messaging and notifications system that allows you to connect to websites via sms, instant message, and email. We’ve done most of this work for international development agencies, so we’re excited to see which topics spark interest with campaigners and to hear what other tools they’re looking for.
Rootscamp is a very cool unconference that brings campaigners together soon after the end of an election season to share their experiences and discuss what worked for them, what bombed, and what tools they need to be more successful. It’s also organized to be open to anyone – and at a cost of just $10 it’s hard to argue that it is. This is always an energizing event, and we’re expecting it to be even more so this year with so many Democratic wins. We’re excited to be sponsoring Rootscamp for the second year in a row. If you go to Rootscamp this weekend, look for us!
Decentralized Data Collection and Real Time Mapping with Drupal
Overview of Our Mapping Session for the Do It With Drupal Conference
How can you get real time data from food security organizations operating on the ground in Africa into the hands of decision makers working to prevent famines based in Washington, DC? I’ll talk about how you can do this with Drupal tomorrow at the Do It With Drupal conference.
In this session, I’ll discuss how to think about workflow based on your target audiences, what that means from a website architecture standpoint, and how you can meet your audiences’ specific needs with Drupal’s flexible architecture and a few newly developed contributed modules. The goal of this session is to enable you to go out and build your own real time mapping tools, similar to what we’ve done for the Food Security Portal.
Holiday Spirit, Photos from the Development Seed Holiday Bash
Watch the Photo Slideshow From Our Holiday Party
Last Thursday the crew from Development Seed got together to kick back for a night and celebrate what we've accomplished in the last year. We had almost a full team with Ian joining us from Colorado and Jose coming over from Spain, and we were just missing our fabulous interns who were hard at work on their final exams. Needless to say, a feast was had, many bottles of wine were drank, and tequila was ordered for all by Eric. Many thanks to Local 16 for hosting us and to Alex for making us look so good.
Here are Alex's photos from the party.
Drupal Meetup Tonight in Washington, DC
Come Out to Talk Drupal, Trade Tricks, and Drink Beer
The last Drupal meetup of the year is happening tonight, and it will be a fun one. On top of all the toasting to a happy holiday season and a great 2009 that will surely be happening, there will also be the usual lightening round of five minute presentations about different Drupal topics. This month Alex and Jeff will talk about some of our recent mapping work. The floor is open so if you’d like to present, just come prepared to talk. Also, the event planner who’s handling the logistics for DrupalCon DC will be joining us tonight, so please come out and introduce yourself.
All the event details are here. Hope to see you tonight!
Week in DC Tech: December 8th Edition
Drupal, PHP, Politics, and Parties This Week in Washington, DC
According to the forecasts, we can expect several extremely cold for DC days this week with maybe even some snow, and strangely enough, a couple downright mild days mixed in. If you want to stay warm and keep your heating bill low, or, depending on the day, enjoy a respite from the cold , we have a few ideas for you that will also help you get your tech fix.
Here are some of the tech events we’re hoping to check out this week. As always, you can find a full listing at DC Tech Events.
Monday, December 8
7:00 – 9:00 pm
DC Drupal Meetup: If you use Drupal or want to learn how to, come out for this meetup to talk with local Drupal developers and users, show off recent projects, and share experiences.
Tuesday, December 9
8:00 – 10:00 am
Broadband Breakfast Club’s Monthly Meeting: Start your day with a discussion on how applications and broadband mapping can increase demand for high-speed internet. Warning: there is a $45 fee for this event.
Wednesday, December 10
6:30 – 9:30 pm
DC’s Web Women’s Holiday Fest: It can be hard to meet the elusive woman techie, but at this party you’ll be surrounded by them. Come out to meet your female colleagues, network, and spread the holiday cheer.
Mapping and Referencing External Data via RDF in Drupal
Aggregating Geo Rich Data (KML or GeoRSS) into an RDF Data Store and Displaying It on a Nice Map
Say you are a development agency with on-the-ground operations, all of which use their own websites to collect geo rich data. You want to be able to associate this data from your on-the-ground programs with private content that’s on your organization’s main intranet back here in Washington, DC (for instance, staff data). Beyond that, you want to view external data and related private content together on a map. If you think about it, this example boils down to the question, “How do you map and reference external data in an unambiguous fashion?”
We spent the last couple of days pulling together the pieces that were missing to answer this question in Drupal. Here’s a rundown of the approach we took and the modules that we rolled out for it.
The Recipe
The basic architecture we came up with is to aggregate geo rich data (KML or GeoRSS) into an RDF data store and display it with Views and Nice Map. For referencing RDF data from nodes, we used the Relations API. For aggregation, we used FeedAPI with KML Parser and FeedAPI RDF processor.
