CycleStreets blog

We are seeking a talented designer with strong user interface abilities to undertake design work for the new Cyclescape website. Timescales are tight. Cyclescape is to be a website (currently under construction) aimed at helping cycling groups around the UK. The work will involve the creation of an overall design concept, plus user interface templates for each of the user pages, and an icon set.

Read more on the Cyclescape website …

We’re pleased to announce the name of our new cycle campaign group toolkit:

Cyclescape

We had over 70 suggestions (including some humorous ones), many of which were excellent ideas.

It became clear that many of the best ideas started with Cycle, and we liked the idea that the name would be co-branded with CycleStreets, i.e. Cycle-s-something.

We also thought it was particularly important to emphasise the geographical aspect of cycle campaigning. We thought that inventing a new word, Cyclescape would be a catchy and unique brand that emphasises the idea of improving the landscape for cycling across our towns and cities.

Having fixed on a shortlist, we began the process of trying to obtain domain names. This took a surprising amount of work as we wanted to ensure we got all the variants (.com/.net/.org) by way of brand protection.

Unlike three years ago when we bought the name CycleStreets, many Cycle+<something> names have now been taken and reserved by domain brokers. After approaching some domain holders, it was clear that some of the best names were going to be prohibitively expensive, in the thousands of pounds, which was well beyond an already-tight budget.

In the end we spent more than we wanted to acquiring the name, but we’re very pleased with it. We hope you like the name too!

Cyclescape.net is currently under development and we’ll be setting up a blog there shortly. @Cyclescape will also be the site’s Twitter identity, so do follow that also.

Andy and Andrew, our developers, have been making excellent progress. Many of the core concepts of the site are in place, so we’ll have screenshots of  the system at ‘alpha’ phase in the next few days. If you’re a coder, follow the code work in progress on Github.

Now we need a logo…

Now we need a logo! We like the idea of a curved section of city, with markers on and a bicycle going upwards. Anyone able to help with that?

CycleStreets has secured £27,000 of funding as a winner of Geovation – GeoVation is an Ordnance Survey initiative and forms part of the Ideas in Transit project with funding from the Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Transport.

Progress on our cycle campaigner toolkit is steaming (pedalling?) ahead! Coding work began on Monday, and will continue solidly for the next few months.

The development of the toolkit has been possible thanks to our GeoVation award, which secured us £27,000 of funding. GeoVation is an Ordnance Survey initiative and forms part of the Ideas in Transit project with funding from the Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Transport.

We're pleased to introduce our developer team, Andy Allan, Andrew France, plus myself (Martin Lucas-Smith) from CycleStreets as project manager. Andy and Andrew will be working in it on solidly for the next few months so that a large amount of development can be done.

We're also approaching various designers and design companies for the work on the design and information architecture aspects of the project.

Get involved in an exciting open source project!

The toolkit is to be developed as an open source project, with the code on Github. It will be written using the technologies of Ruby on Rails (v3.1), PostgreSQL, and jQuery.

Volunteers are needed to contribute to the code from the end of October. If you'd be interested, do let us know.

We're aiming to build a project team who will develop and look after the system from December onwards. By that stage, the grant-funded development work will mean that the system is already fully-featured and well coded so should be in a good state to add functionality to.

Timeline

We'll have:

• Screenshots of our 'alpha' available by 21^st October.
• A beta available to a few campaign groups from by 4^th November. If your group would like to be a 'guinea-pig', do let us know! We'll start to open it up to more groups in the month following.
• General availability of the site around 2^nd December, with bugfixes and additional features leading to the week before Christmas.

Stay tuned to this blog and our Twitter feed for updates.

We're also seeking an additional grant of around £10k to enable us to undertake solid coding on some of the more advanced features that groups have suggested, particularly do deal with more complex issues like cross-group sharing, which will increase the utility of the system considerably.

Designing the toolkit

We held our first developer meetings this week to develop the specification further and do some wireframing:

We're pleased to publish an updated specification for the campaigner toolkit, following consultation with groups and including further changes.

There's been lots of useful feedback submitted by e-mail, twitter, blog replies, and in meetings we've had. These comments were turned into about ten pages of bullet-points (165 points!) for working into the spec.

Many of the points raised were useful points for clarification, or small new features, and a few raised issues relating to group structure. There were no problems raised with the substantive direction and nature of the toolkit.

The Description of the toolkit and what it will do is still available and has not needed to be updated. However, the full detailed functional specification has been updated and is below.

We were delighted to receive various positive comments which very much reflect our hopes for the system. For instance:

"One great advantage I can see is that it'll potentially help balance out the workload within our cycle campaign by allowing the latest status on any particular issue to always be seen on the system. Getting more campaign member involvement will also help with our committee's workload."

"I like the push/pull options of mail list and forum. Can't think of anything you've missed. I'm hopeful that this will encourage common issues to do with rules or conventions to float to the top and be tackled at source."

Things that have been updated or added in the spec, as a result of the consultation are:

• Clarification of the idea of a 'Library' of best practice
• Presence of tips to help best practice in campaigning
• Specification of the polls and petitions components
• Issues relating to federated/overlapping groups
• Committee privacy basis
• Notion of groups having democratically-agreed policy stances that members must adhere to
• Clarifications about grouping and splitting of threads
• Ability to involve elected Councillors rather than just officers
• Tightening of a few areas regarding mail integration
• Emphasis on outcomes rather than endless discussion
• Notion of cross-member 'recommended campaign' topics
• Daily digest
• Removal of the notion of a compromise objective, which could undermine a group's negotiating position
• Addition of avoidance of uploading very large volumes of documents, which could create costs
• And various other minor changes

The latest version of the specification is available. It is now a living document that incorporates updates in the light of implementation as we move into the coding/design phase.

A draft Module structure (work in progress) which describes an implementation of the functional specification, is being finalised. This will form the basis of the developers' work.

CycleStreets has secured £27,000 of funding as a winner of Geovation – GeoVation is an Ordnance Survey initiative and forms part of the Ideas in Transit project with funding from the Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Transport.

Since we won £27,000 for the development of our campaigning toolkit we've been pondering what to call it.

The themes we want to capture in the name are:

• The idea of a central place where cycle users around the UK can submit problems they encounter on the street network
• A central place to facilitate campaigning
• Cycling (!)
• Collaborative
• Well-informed campaigning
• Constructive and forceful debate but without being adversarial
• Improving our streets and routes
• Keeping track of all the problems and being able to manage them effectively
• The ability to say "I'll report it on the … website" and write "Go to … to report/fix a problem"
• Name needs to be short and catchy – long names are harder to type in

Here are some initial ideas we've had, though not all are usable names – it was just a brainstorm. We're not really happy with any of them. Can you help suggest a catchy name? Leave a comment below or drop us a line.

CycleStreets has secured £27,000 of funding as a winner of Geovation – GeoVation is an Ordnance Survey initiative and forms part of the Ideas in Transit project with funding from the Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Transport.

This is a technical post – you can stop reading now if you're not into web development!

We've been continuing to develop the spec that we recently published for the toolkit.

Several options for development have emerged.
We outline these in our Technical Options Report.

We'd welcome any comments.

CycleStreets has secured £27,000 of funding as a winner of Geovation – GeoVation is an Ordnance Survey initiative and forms part of the Ideas in Transit project with funding from the Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Transport.

As we announced recently, CycleStreets is one of the winners of the GeoVation contest, with our bid for a comprehensive online campaigning toolkit to assist cycle campaign groups around the UK.

The first phase of this project is finalising a specification for the toolkit. Here is the description of what it will do. This outlines what the toolkit will do, how people and groups will be able to use it. The full specification also has a prioritisation of these features.

We warmly welcome comments from groups around the UK on this draft, and will be publishing a further more finalised draft, incorporating comments received, in a week's time for our deadline of 24th July. Please do contact us to give us your views.

We've tried to include as many of the ideas we've received and come up with as possible. We hope the attached draft will give cycling groups an idea of how much the toolkit will assist their work.

We hope also its themes of bringing campaigners together and, where possible, involving Local Authority contacts will help usher in a collective spirit of work to improve cycling conditions around the UK.

• Description of the toolkit and what it will do: a 2-page condensed summary
• Toolkit specification (summary)
• or Read the full draft specification (warning – long!) (Version 2, 24th July 2011)

Let us know your thoughts.

Older versions:

• Full spec, version 1

We’re pleased to announce that our bid, for a comprehensive online campaigning toolkit to assist cycle campaign groups around the UK, is a winner in the GeoVation contest!

It brings £27,000 for the development of a toolkit which, in the words of one supporter, should be “a hugely important step forward for all cycle campaigning groups”.

Our bid was one of 155 ideas submitted to the GeoVation challenge, on the theme of “How can we improve transport in Britain?”. Our bid was shortlisted, and we attended the GeoVation Camp in March to help develop the proposal amongst a total of 30 ideas invited. We were one of the final ten proposals, and took part in a Dragon’s Den -style pitch on Wednesday.

We were delighted to be picked as one of the winners who share the £150k pot of funding.

   

Photos by Ordnance Survey, licenced CC BY-NC 2.0

Martin Lucas-Smith, who presented the bid alongside CycleStreets’ routemaster, Simon Nuttall, said:

“We were delighted to be picked by the Ordnance Survey’s judges as one of the winners. The £27,000 of funding will enable us to get this much-needed project off the ground.

“As a member of one of the many local cycle campaign groups who will benefit, I’m all too aware of the large number of issues on the street network that need improvement, and the difficulty of managing this deluge of problems.

“The new system will help campaigners around the country convert these problem reports into prioritised, well-evidenced solution proposals. It should help them work more productively with local councils to see changes implemented.”

We’d like to thank all the groups who provided quotes of support for our bid, including the CTC, Cyclenation, London Cycling Campaign, and a variety of groups around the country. We’re working to provide you with a really great, useful and user-friendly system that will save a lot of time and effort.

Some of the things the new system will be able to do are:

• Enable members of the public and campaigners easily to pinpoint where cycling is difficult
• Help groups prioritise what to work on
• Pull in planning application data automatically, so that potential issues needing attention are readily accessible
• Automatically notify and involve people who cycle through an area – who therefore have an interest in seeing issues fixed
• Make geographical data such as collision data and accessibility analysis easily available, to provide context
• Enable simpler and more focussed discussion based on specific issues, groups of issues, or themes
• Enable best practice to be ‘pulled-in’ to discussions, by providing off-the-shelf examples shared from elsewhere in the UK
• Enable groups to include LA contacts in these discussions if they wish
• Enable groups to assemble ‘solution’ resources so that problems can be resolved on the ground
• Give groups a variety of ways of publishing their activity on their website easily.