This Saturday Emmet and I meet to walk the lake. We will walk it with a GPS device so we can leave a trail, and we will mark points of interest.

We then plan to read out the data, visualise the information we have collected and look at what we’re going to do with it. This will start to build the mapping element of this project. From the beginning of collaboration, Emmet asked “Do the workshops and interviews with the users just create content or dictate the structure and behaviour of the project?” I had explained that the intention was to achieve both of these things, but that a framework needed to be created/presented for the first workshop. From thinking about this framework we started to define the project.

There needs to be a skeleton of a project that’s taken into the workshop. And this skeleton is based on a map on which people can put ideas.

A lot of this skeleton is a map. It might be like a screen with virtual pins. When you hit a pin you enter the wiki and then anyone can add a wiki entry, and anyone can retrieve information from the map. So in the workshop you have a map with push pins that allows you to enter the wiki or/and a wiki with places that allows you to enter the map.

We then started focussing the idea further. This allowed us to define what we believe is the ’start-out’ function of the tool. Imagine boxes/grids that you enter or exit. And you can say, “I’ve walked this route and passed through these boxes.” Emmet said we should think about constrained walking. Each walk a user makes or wants to make can be information pulled together by looking at what information is in each box that is passed through. This information acts like a guide to the area. It’s full of all kinds of information - people’s feelings, knowledge, flora and fauna data, pollution counts…It can be filtered. It’s printable. It can be taken back to that place.

From here, Emmet said that we should start asking “What if the tool does this or that?” and that this approach would get us closer to defining the function. This weekend we will be able to ask this question with a lot of focus.

What if a person passing through this route can do this?

Think about spaces that people pass through
Spaces that people can tune into
Think of urban walks
Memories that lie beneath that space
Layers of experience
Think of a “community of places”

We now are sure that we help to create the content at first. And that everyone can add to the content. But now we see this content gets taken out again. But this time it has more meaning, or new meaning. And when it’s taken back out, it could trigger something new.

The content of the wiki can therefore become specific to the user. It’s not just some kind of junk filled data hole. It’s akin to openlondon but it’s more. It might juxtapose city and county, or rather town and country.

We established that we have to create a Theirwork Version 0.1 to get started. Version 0.2 might be quite different as we find what works, what doesn’t, what’s needed, what’s not.

To start off, we agreed that we need to use a wiki but that the project might not end up as a wiki.

Side note
Emmet had already established that he was not going to use pmwiki because it used flat files…these text files are just pages that have to be retrieved and reloaded and they are not searchable. He also looked at WikiMedia but it appeared less manageable. “MediaWiki may be more fully featured, but it’s a total beast under the hood, and would probably prove more difficult to modify in any major way”. Emmet went with phpwiki because it uses msql. It works faster and he has made it so that databases can be combined with other databases, - they can talk to each other - such as the one in this blog and the one in the community forum. So now we have the wiki set up set up, and this (1:1) blog for this kind of stuff, and Emmet has set up a forum for the community - and at this forum we are really going to listen to.

This weekend we will then see the start of gps information getting added to our work. To prepare for this, Emmet has been looking to see if there’s any open source map software we can adopt. Tomorrow we are reviewing what he has found, in readiness for the weekend. We are also analysing mapping software in general.

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