Big Map to e-NABLE the Future

For transparency - I am the creator and maintainer of the current map, I also maintain the Hub as well as the infrastructure around it. I've never asked for compensation, and when offered I declined.

This proposal in my mind has a core flaw - voluntary submissions from the community. The medium of where and how those submissions are later displayed is for this context irrelevant. Throughout the years there was never a lack of places to submit stories, there was always a community website/hub/forum. EnablingTheFuture.org has existed for a very long time as the "front page" of this community and where those stories were published.

Most of the work made to gather and promote these stories was done by Jen Owen and later Ben Rubin. These two names aren't exclusive to the effort, however their efforts were standout. It took extraordinary amount of time and effort to compile those stories, actual journalism took place. I can attest to that as Ben interviewed me like a professional when writing a story about my efforts. It takes more to write a story then listing out facts. That and more in my mind was, and still is required to gather these stories in a cohesive way.

This proposal does not address this at all. A simple form with a map as the aggregate display medium requiring users to submit their stories. Yet another e-NABLE satellite website with yet more fragmentation of the community with only passive aggregation. There is nothing even mentioned about importing existing e-NABLE stories from Google+, WikiFactory, the current Hub, yet alone treasure troves of content that can be obtained from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, list goes on. Passive automated aggregation of existing and future stories - now that's a proposal worth the asking price and more.

I will mention this as I believe it is relevant, but without ranting - what was shown in terms of the UI is generously put - esthetically challenged. Not up to modern day UI/UX standards in any meaningful way.

With all of this and more (sorry for the Ted Talk length as is) I'd value this proposal at less than 20% of the asking price, which at that point might be worth considering as a test platform.

As is - hard pass from me.

I fail to see the that the cost of this proposal is justified. The money involved could be used in more beneficial ways to promote the distribution of devices to needy recipients, sorry.

Thanks for the comments, Pro and Con. I want to respond to Mazvy's comment that "there is nothing even mentioned about importing existing e-NABLE stories from Google+, WikiFactory, the current Hub, yet alone treasure troves of content that can be obtained from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, list goes on. Passive automated aggregation of existing and future stories - now that's a proposal worth the asking price and more".

The harvesting of existing stories is in fact a critical component of the project, and should have been made more explicit. I personally spent several man-weeks some few years ago writing software that harvested over a thousand stories from facebook, which is where the vast majority of the content was to be found. (I think it still is the largest single source of past stories). My project effort was thwarted by facebook's ever-evolving protections against scraping, which is what inspires us to propose now that we build a system embedded within Facebook. This will facilitate a within-facebook workflow that will ultimately liberate that content from facebook's walled garden by putting it on the Big Map. The submission process that Mazvy alludes to is a sidepath for content that does not originate in facebook and it is very much our intention use that path to add all that past content to the Big Map.

So the proposal here comes close to what Mazvy describes as "Passive automated aggregation of existing and future stories - now that's a proposal worth the asking price and more." If we can come up with a purely passive method we can feed it in to the system using the sidepath. Failing that, simple tagging within facebook will bring most of the available content into a curation system where it will be massaged, collated and then displayed, along with content from other sources including Jen and Ben's past work, on an interactive globe like http://BigMapToSaveTheFuture.org (which is considerably more sophisticated than the static mockups in the proposal).

@Jon Schull There is nothing in the proposal that would indicate how, what and from which sources stories will be imported into the map. If this is "in fact a critical component of the project" - then how is a critical component not documented at all in the proposal?

If this project will utilize your efforts of extracting Facebook posts and my efforts of sanitizing Google+ and WikiFactory content - what exactly are we paying the people creating this project then? To copy/paste the data we collected into their database? What about other data, other sources, future data?

I am evaluating the proposal based on what is presented in a "contractual" sense. The cost of this project including the initial seeding will be close to $10 000. This is an extremely high premium for a basic web project as presented by the proposal and video recordings.

I don't see the cost justification at all based on what is presented here.

I appreciate the comments by Mazvy and Jon, implementation of what's proposed here needs to avoid the all too familiar "just another map, soon outdated" problem. Mazvy has highlighted the community participation has lessons to offer up from the current systems in place, it's critical the next implementation learns from this. I gather this may be the intention but more needs to be done to show how this is also the plan in this implementation. In my experience there needs to be a human in the loop to seed the data collection process and later oversee its cleaning and regular update. Doesn't have to be every day or every week but with a determined frequency. Allocation of a stipend for this human effort will help make the most of the tech being invested in.

Lastly, it costs little to nothing to recognize contributors and their contribution, no matter how small it may seem. But, it takes a human to do so. And recognition in community projects initiates positive feedback.

By the thinnest of margins (20 votes 77% agreement, when 80% was needed) this proposal did not pass. I appreciate the thoughtful comments (pro and con) and expect to be back with an improved proposal which increases both engagement and "ease of use" for "humans in the loop". (That's the criticism I found most useful. It seems to me that most other criticisms were based on a confusion of the (dull and boring) static website with the (rich and interactive) real thing. But that's not to blame the critics! We'll need to tell our story more effectively next time.)