Looks good so far, I would add displaying location information (where are the freely pickable fruit & nut trees) and (maybe not phase I) GIS based searching.

what would be the reasons to visit a VIS??
a) ask a question or
b) post some information out for the collective good or
c) collectively do something together.

I also believe DRUPAL would be a good candidate to use as the environment.
I believe it should be as open-source as possible and act as a template for other cities
I believe there are two GIS points that are important to every transaction
1..) where the question/response is directed to
2..) where the question/response is coming from
Another vital component of the transaction is the relevant range from the question/answer target (how far out from the source should you search? this would demand a GIS perspective to the data base).

If I were designing a template for an interface, I would organize it as follows:

A) Neighborhood Vision and Goals : this may be as simple as a logo, the web interface or as complex as a mission statement and set of objectives.
B) Questions : This is a multi-leveled question engine. It may have qualifiers or categories to search from (the list from jonathon's email)
C) Short-term needs : This is like the question engine, only you put in your need and it tries to match it up with resources based on the categories you picked and the relevant range you have selected
D) Longer-term Projects : These will be collaboritive schedulers. It will help with communication between people (email), resource management, money management and time management.

In the end, these systems will act like community bulletin boards but more flexible and dynamic. They will hold the projects people are working on, the news, meetings, potlucks :-) , births and deaths. They may in the end be the banking systems.

The list that jonathon gave (Skills, Interests, Tools/Equipment, Books/Media, Food production, Structural resources) seems like it would be a questionairre that we would use to put together the data set we would need to search from. Maybe the first step is to put together a questionairre. I like the questionairre on our site but I think we would tailor it much more to practical items that could be of use to a community (ie. skills, interests, etc.)
--mike

VILLAGE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

(Part of a commencement speech as given by Terry Tempest Williams to University of Utah, may 02, 2003)
"...What does the open-space of democracy look like?
In the open space of democracy there is room for dissent.
In the open space of democracy there is room for differences.
In the open space of democracy, the health of the environment is seen as the wealth of our communities.
We remember that our character has been shaped by the diversity of America's landscapes
and it is precisely that character that will protect it.
Cooperation is valued more than competition; prosperity becomes the caretaker of poverty.
The humanities are not peripheral, but the very art of what it means to be human.
In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional, but essential to our survival as a species.
And technology is not rendered at the expense of life, but developed out of a reverence for life.
Reverence for life...."

What is the problem being addressed?

Within the United States, as citizens, we are looking at a near-term future of rapidly increasing energy prices, increasing food prices, and increasing housing prices. Parallel to this, under the pressure of global labor, are decreasing annum wages for the working populace of the United States. Modern energy prices are primarily influenced through the transportation of people and product. More mass is moving around the world than ever in history. Transportation has been primarily influenced by petroleum products. Petroleum has become the central dominating force of the industrial age and was discovered less than 150 years ago. Since that time the population of the world has grown by more than 6x primarily through innovation in food production (again, petroleum infused). Now we are peaking on the oil production curve. Oil will become progressively more crude. Oil will become increasingly more expensive to mine. And now that we really know how to use it, usage and demand over the world markets is ever increasing. Conversely, it is seen, that as America has been the biggest consumer of that industrial age, the differences will be felt all the more strongly within it.

Localized communication networks will be a valuable asset to neighborhood communities within this special period.

In this future, we will in fact, move backward to a time more than a hundred years ago, when people were much more connected to the place they were born and a geographic point-of-view was much more relevant to the food you ate and the work you did. The neighborhood was a social center for a lifetime. Trains, planes and automobiles have allowed us to expand our social center to be as wide as our budget and time to travel. Declining oil supplies & reserves will focus us into a more localized perspective. The information systems of the future will take on the attributes of space and time into every transaction. The viewer will direct a query from a location on the planet to another location on the planet with a certain radial perspective to the query (how far outward from the point specified do you want the search to traverse or be valid?)

What is the solution proposed?

Village Information Systems.
VIS is a GIS (geographic information system)-centric view of the neighborhood. It is a way to look outward from a single point on the planet and ask the questions "What is close to me" and "How can I relate to it?". It will connect people, projects, resources and ideas from a localized perspective. Each system that develops will have a common protocol to talk to other localized systems within a global network. Each system is fault-tolerant meaning it can exist by itself or within an ever-expanding network. It must allow for the diversity of different communities with different sizes, regions, resources and needs. It must last over time; be able to change as the community does. Self-maintain with very little upkeep (be able to adjust itself) and be able to keep out the spam, spy-bots, and network invaders that can deluge a network without supervision.

VIS are neighborhood points-of-views. They are seen as centers for Community News, Community Gossip, Calendar scheduling, Project scheduling and Need/Resource /Skill mapping. There should be a public side to them and a private side to them, a side that opens to all (or a selective list ) of viewers and one side that is open to only the members of that site and maybe even a closer-knit group who are the administrators and the editors and the journalists and the educators who keep the sites in motion.

What are the deliverables?
Phase I: (six months) ($5K)
o 4-5 data sets (open-source) that simulate various types of neighborhood cultures. These will be used for mapping demonstrations and targetted queries. A final presentation will be shown at six months from start of project. There may be intermediate presentations at agreed upon intervals to show progress. Phase II will be decided from the final presentation and the final questionnaire.
o an open-source environment for communication, scheduling, and skill resource mapping. This will be a system similar to Drupal and what has been used for portlandpeakoil.org and thecrashcourse.org websites.
o The environment will be extended to accomodate the data sets designed for. It will allow cartesian and time mapping to all events and data points. One of the original prototype demonstrations will be a skill set mapping capability to geographic regions. Other types of mapping will be developed from this experience and code base. Google Map is a potential candidate as an API (Application Program Interface)
o a set of training tools that will allow others to build a similar type of system.
o a set of tools that will analyze the site over time and be able to help with improvements.
o a questionnaire for the public based on the data sets given in the final demonstration. These questionnaires will be used to put together real data sets based on the prototype and demonstrations.

Phase II: (six months) ($15K)
This will be a team to put together and monitor 3-5 real neighborhood networks in a VIS methodology over another six month period of time. The eventual product will be distributed within the open-source community; within school systems, political environments and through word-of-mouth and email.

So what does it take to put it in motion?
People:
There have already been meetings among some of the technical staff from the cityrepair.org and portlandpeakoil.org organizations. The VIS project has been tried once within city repair with valuable use and data storage information gathered in the process. Others have been involved with alternative information consortiums and secure and non-secure environments in professional environments. There have been joint meetings where these experiences have been discussed and improved upon. In all, there could be up to 8 people who could volunteer labor into a project like this.

Money:
$5K for Phase I will buy the network and be able to slightly reimburse people for vital pieces of the end-product deliverables. Mostly volunteer projects are hard to pull off without some sort of reimbursement for effort. This will be in an agreed upon format before any moneys are exchanged.

Network:
It is seen that for the duration of the project, it is easier to rent host space than to build it yourself. We would recommend local hosting for the development web-site. The prototype web-site will be curtailed to a vastly reduced set of viewers until the final demonstration is approved. A viewer will have to login to see the developing web-site over the development period.

Time:
Phase I Deliverables
o DataBase and Data Sets (40-80 hours)
o Environment (20-30 hours)
o Extending the Environment and Data Set to a Geographic Data Set (20-40 hours)
o Training Tools (20-40 hours)
o Audit Tools (20-40 hours)
o Questionnaire (40-80 hours)

Approval Chain for Phase I
o 2-3 Small Demos (50%, 75%, 100%)
o 1 final Demonstration
o 1 Questionaire

quietstorm,
What do these metrics mean in your case?
Be specific? people-specific, the region as a whole??

--mike

Thanks for bringing this up quietstorm. I can see that some folks will inherently see a monetary value tied to their time/services rendered. If there is reasonable interest in this metric I must then question if this should be a featured component of the VIS. Much of the inspiration from the VIS was derived from a volunteer resource database with a geographical component to see the proximity of skills, resources, and needs. I think we should have an optional time/dollar metric but how to phrase the question in the survey does not jump out at me right now. Any suggestions quietstorm and others?