Blog - Development Seed

Week in DC Tech: May 13

Development Seed — 2013-05-13T00:00:00-07:00

There's a technology event for everyone this week in Washington, DC with a HacDC meetup on tech revamping, an Enyo.JS demo for developers, an outdoor Drone event, and more. Go out and take advantage of everything DC has to offer by being productive and learning something new. Check back weekly for our roundup of local technology events.

Tuesday, May 14

7:30 pm

HacDC: Join DC Hackers as they find new ways to tinker with technology. Help them improve the world by breaking down and rebuilding technology, all while in the pursuit of finding new uses for it. For more information visit them at hacdc.org.

Wednesday, May 15

6:30 pm

Introduction to Enyo.JS: This one is for the developers. Come and learn about Enyo.JS, a JavaScript framework that's new to the scene through a demo of Enyo.JS and a discussion around how it's simplifying cross-platform mobile and desktop app development. Learn how to create well-structured, maintainable apps at this CrossPlatformDev meetup.

8:30 pm - 1:30 am

DC Nightowls: The DC Nightowls move back to the AOL Fishbowl Labs for their productivity and coworking session. Satisfy your urge to work into the early hours of the morning in NoVa with your fellow Nightowls.

Saturday, May 18

2:00 pm

Drone User Group: Join the Drone User Group this week as artist and developer Terry Kilby leads an aerial photography demonstration using a drone. He'll discuss how to select the best equipment and how to compose your shots to capture the highest quality images. Come learn about Kilby's work and techniques, contribute your own knowledge, and have fun flying drones at this week's DC Drone User Group.

Major New Features in Prose v1

Development Seed — 2013-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

We're thrilled to release a new version of Prose, adding in new features like a metadata editor, Jekyll layout previews, a markdown toolbar, temporary caching of in-progress edits, and more, all wrapped in a redesigned user friendly interface.

Just seven weeks ago, Tristen laid out ambitious plans to redesign and refocus Prose to make it a beautifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites. Since then, and as part of our work on the next version of healthcare.gov, we've been sprinting to redesign, resolve bugs, and add new features. You can start using Prose v1 now at Prose.io, or check out the source on GitHub. Here's a look at what's new.

Simple, flat user interface

The new user interface for Prose is all about editing content. We've removed the distractions and focused on creating a simple environment for writing content and managing websites in GitHub.

The layout scales much better to include new feature like a markdown formatting toolbar in the file editor, and paves the way for a responsive layout, which we hope to implement soon.

Metadata editor for Jekyll posts

When using Prose with a Jekyll site, we've made it simpler to manage the yaml front matter for posts. By implementing a form-based editor, developers can set default metadata values and let content editors edit them without typing any yaml.

The metadata editor is completely configurable to match the metadata values required for custom Jekyll sites. Developers should check out the Prose configuration documentation for a look at what's possible.

Jekyll layout previews

Now Prose previews Jekyll posts in their full layout so you can get an accurate picture of what posts will look like before you publish them.

To use the layout previews with a Jekyll site, just add a line to your _config.yml file to tell Prose where your published site is hosted.

Performance, refactoring, and more

There are dozens of bug fixes and smaller new features in Prose. By focusing on page load performance, we shaved off about a second from each editor page load. We've also refactored a lot of the codebase to follow more standard conventions, and documented guidelines for developing on GitHub.

For a full list of everything new, check out the closed pull requests on GitHub.

Next up

We're jumping right into a new sprint to add a few more features that we think will really enhance the content editing experience in Prose. Over the next few weeks, we'll be adapting to a responsive layout and testing Prose on tablets and smart phones — great for making quick edits to content on the go. We're also working on a image / file upload feature, so you can easily add inline images or attached files in your posts. And we're sketching out how we can improve linking to posts within a site instead of needing to past URLs to published posts.

We'd love your contributions. Head over to GitHub to get started or report an issue. To learn more about Prose, see the Prose anouncement post.

Week in DC Tech: May 6

Development Seed — 2013-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

There are some interesting technology events taking place in and around the District this week on topics like Perl, drones, and more. Check out a new meetup group or revisit one you know and learn something awesome this week.

Tuesday, May 7

9:00 am - 2:00 pm

DC Area Drone User Group: Drones are a hot button issue whether talking about their use in modern warfare to privacy concerns around recreational use. At this meetup, come learn more about drones, the controversy and concerns around their use, and the technology that powers them.

7:30 pm

DC Perl Mongers:

On the first Tuesday of the month, folks with a passion for Perl based programming and open source tech get together to discuss new tricks of the trade. This month they will be talking about contributing to The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).

Saturday, May 11

2:30 pm - 7:30 pm

DC Nightowls in Baltimore: The DC Nightowls are taking off to Baltimore this weekend and pairing up with Emerging Technology Center! Bring Your Own Project and be productive with your peers at the Beehive in Baltimore. This meetup is taking place outside of their usual hours of operation, so get there early and contribute often.

6:00 pm

Nerd Nite DC: Join your fellow nerds for a night of drinking and learning at DC9 in the U street corridor. This month's Nerd Night will feature talks about Material Science and how it's changing the way we eat chocolate, how art can be saved by science, and all you ever wanted to know about the "fat innkeeper worm". Join the party and learn something new this week.

Hosting May DC Web API Meetup at Development Seed

Development Seed — 2013-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

This Thursday, May 9 at 6:00pm we're hosting this month's meeting of the DC Web API User Group at the Development Seed office. Each month the Meetup focuses on web API development and technologies, and is a new group for sharing the latest developments in web API's in the area. Speakers include our own Dave Cole, who will present the latest work on the new healthcare.gov content API, and how we're using it to add dynamic features to a CMS-free website.

As a part of the upcoming relaunch of the new healthcare.gov, all content will be made available through a JSON API. This opens up the ability for other government agencies or private sector websites to pull in up-to-date official content. Dave will run through how we're using a custom Jekyll plugin to generate the API, how the site consumes this API itself to generate dynamic features, and how offering a content API will help extend the reach of official content to other websites.

There is a full evening of great speakers. Marina Martin from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Transportation Security Administration's Neil Bonner, and Barg Upender from Mobomo will all be presenting their latest work.

Join us at the Development Seed office. We'll be kicking things off at 6:00pm with food and drinks, sponsored by our friends at CHIEF and GitHub.

6:00 - 6:30 Food, drinks and networking
6:30 - 6:45 Introductions & Community Announcements
6:45 - 8:00 Presentations
- Dave Cole, Development Seed
- Marina Martin, OSTP
- Neil Bonner, Transportation Security Administration
- Barg Upender, Mobomo
8:00 - 9:00 Panel + Q&A

Development Seed's office is at 1714 14th St NW. The entrance is off the alley behind the west side of 14th Street.

Introducing Jekyll-hook: Run your own GitHub Pages

Development Seed — 2013-05-01T00:00:00-07:00

Few services have altered the way we build websites like GitHub Pages. The free hosting service that updates websites every time you commit changes to GitHub runs nearly all of our projects over the last two years, including some really big ones, like the United Nations Development Programme's open data portal. It is fast, reliable, and has an incredibly easy workflow for development.

For those cases where we need the simplicity of GitHub Pages' workflow but have to host on our own infrastructure, we built Jekyll-hook. It's an extensible server that builds Jekyll sites on each commit to a GitHub repository, just like GitHub Pages. It provides a ton of additional flexibility, while preserving the benefits of static site generation, like needing no server-side processing to serve webpages.

Jekyll-hook is a Node.js server that receives web hook requests from GitHub.com, or a GitHub Enterprise server, generates a Jekyll site, and publishes it. The generation and publication processes are configurable with simple bash scripts. Get the full details at the Jekyll-hook project readme.

Why use Jekyll-hook?

For the majority of our projects, GitHub Pages works well. But there are some cases where additional needs drive us to build our own hosting environment:

Use Jekyll plugins
Publish directly to a CDN
Host content behind authentication

Use Jekyll plugins

With GitHub Pages, Jekyll runs in safe mode, which means no third-party plugins will run. On a project like healthcare.gov, we encounter several simple problems that can be solved with small plugins that alter the way Jekyll builds the website. For instance, we just released the Jekyll Google Analytics plugin we're using to download Google Analytics data and sort posts by popularity each time the new healthcare.gov website is rebuilt.

Using Jekyll-hook, you set up the Jekyll server, so you can run whatever plugins you want. Jekyll plugins introduce much lower risk than traditional CMS modules, because they run when the site is built, not when it is served. You can verify the plugin does what it should before your publish the website and not have to worry about plugins slowing down page load time.

In addition to Jekyll-ga, the new healthcare.gov uses plugins to generate a JSON-based content API, provide greater control to content administrators over post ordering and curation, and generate landing pages for blog post topics.

Publish directly to a CDN

For those cases where you need to be 100% certain of your website's availability and responsiveness, we recommend using a content distribution network. For MapBox, we use Cloudfront, which is part of Amazon Web Services. For healthcare.gov, we're planning to use Akamai. Both replicate content across a globally distributed network of servers to provide fast, reliable content delivery.

With Jekyll-hook, you write simple bash scripts to customize how your website is built where it is published. For the absolute best performance from your site, you would write a script that directly published your website to a cloud-based hosting environment like Amazon S3 or Akamai Net Storage and serve it through a CDN.

We've included a sample script that publishes Jekyll sites to Amazon S3. It works in the same way that GitHub Pages works, where repositories named *.github.com or *.github.io are hosted at the root of the S3 bucket, and other repositories for an owner or organization are hosted in subdirectories. If you use Jekyll-hook on new infrastructure, please contribute your publish scripts so we make it easy to people to use this server in a variety of hosting environments. We'll be working on an Akamai Net Storage script next.

Host content behind authentication

Occasionally, we'll work on a project that needs to be protected by authentication, either because the data is private or during development of a yet-to-be released website. To make this easier, we've included a sample NGINX configuration and publish script so that Jekyll-hook can build sites to a simple web server with basic authentication. For the new healthcare.gov build, we're using this on a micro EC2 server for a free / cheap development server that we can use to test and share the progress of our development.

Growing the CMS-free website stack

Just about nine months ago, we published our thoughts on building better websites by using Jekyll to generate static sites from content files and templates. By pairing this approach with APIs and embeds from services like Twitter, Disqus, Flickr, and Vimeo, we can build full-featured websites with absolutely no server-side processing when pages are viewed. It's an incredibly scalable and versatile approach that we're learning a lot about and expanding through our work with HHS on healthcare.gov.

About a year ago, to make editing static website simple for content writers, we built and released Prose — an open source web-based editor for Jekyll sites hosted on GitHub Pages. It's a writers' window into the powerful version control and collaboration features of GitHub. We're just a few days away from releasing the first major version of Prose, which focuses on improving the usability and simplicity of editing content with a refreshed interface, metadata editor, and support for full in-layout previews.

Now we're pushing the stack even further. In addition to the major upgrades to Prose, we recently shared how we're providing multi-lingual translations for Jekyll sites, our approach to accessibility testing, and released the Jekyll Google Analytics plugin, bringing a whole new level of advanced features to Jekyll sites that previously required clunky content management systems.

Jekyll-hook is the latest piece of the puzzle. By removing the dependency on GitHub Pages for hosting, the CMS-free stack is becoming one of the most open and flexible way to build websites.

Cover photo by sbisson, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Week in DC Tech: April 29

Development Seed — 2013-04-29T00:00:00-07:00

As we move into May, come out to learn about fun new wearable tech, talk "failure" with people who have been there and can find the humor in it, and stay informed about the great OpenStreetMap projects being innovated on right here in Washington, DC. Also this Friday we'll kickoff the Sunlight Foundation's sixth TransparencyCamp with a Open Government Happy Hour in the MapBox Garage. Have a great week and I hope to see you around!

Tuesday, April 30

6:00 pm

Tech4Dem FAILfaire and Happy Hour: This event attempts to take away the stigma of failing. The motto of FAILfaire is to learn from each others mistakes, so come and hear stories of tech projects for social change that haven't been major successes but are great learning experiences. If you're in the mood for a humorous, tongue-in-cheek look at the what does and does not work when starting a tech4dem project, check out FAILfaire 2013.

Wednesday, May 1

6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Anticipating Google Glass: Get an up-close look at Google's newest (and dare I say coolest) piece of tech, the Glass, with fellow "wearable tech" enthusiasts. Google has just shipped out the first batch of the Glass, so go see and learn all about them for yourself, while also getting to !

7:00 pm

Geo DC: May's Geo DC meetup will look at OpenStreetMap with a quick introduction to it followed by three lightening talks on editing OpenStreetMap and great projects that are changing the way OpenStreetMap is being used. Come see MapBox's Tom MacWright and Ansis Brammanis demo iD Editor.

Friday, May 3

6:30 pm - 10:00 pm

Open Government Happy Hour: MapBox is hosting a happy hour to kick off this weekend's TransparencyCamp! Come join us for cold drinks, tasty eats, and good company in the MapBox garage the night before the conference.

Saturday, May 4 - Sunday, May 5

TransparencyCamp 2013: This weekend the Sunlight Foundation is hosting it's sixth TransparencyCamp, an "unconference" for open government that promotes the use of new technologies and policies that make government more efficient and transparent. The goal of this conference is to create an atmosphere where everyone feels like they can contribute equally and be heard among the group. Individuals are encouraged to take part in making the schedule, leading sessions, and actively contributing to the framework of the conference.

New Plugin Brings Google Analytics Data to Jekyll Sites

Development Seed — 2013-04-26T00:00:00-07:00

For a content-heavy site like the new healthcare.gov, surfacing popular content gets the most interesting information to readers quickly. To make this possible with static sites generated with Jekyll, we're releasing the new jekyll-ga plugin that gets the latest Google Analytics data when Jekyll builds the site, making it available to use for sorting and in templates.

By default Jekyll sorts content posts chronologically and alphabetically. This works well for blogs, but now with jekyll-ga, we have many more options. Any metric you can track in Google Analytics — including custom variables — can be used to sort content or as a variable in our Liquid templates.

Using the plugin

Jekyll has a plugin system thats allows for dropping in custom code written in Ruby to generate or modify content. Any .rb files in the /_plugins directory get run at site build time.

Full instructions for setting up jekyll-ga are in the readme file, but here's the basic idea. By adding some configuration information into the _config.yml file for a Jekyll site, you can define a custom report to query from Google Analytics. You can specify any metric you want, and the date range for the report using absolute dates or several relative date formats such as now, yesterday, last week, and three months ago. Optionally, you can apply filters or segments to your reports based on settings you configure in Google Analytics. Here's how it all looks:

jekyll_ga:
  service_account_email:    # service account email address
  key_file: privatekey.p12  # service account private key file
  key_secret: notasecret    # service account private key's password
  profileID: ga:####        # profile ID 
  start: last month         # Beginning of report
  end: now                  # End of report
  metric: ga:pageviews      # Metric code
  segment:                  # optional
  filters:                  # optional
  sort: true                # Sort posts by this metric

In this case, we're querying pageviews, but you could use any metric available in Google analytics, which opens up several possibilities for organizing your content. For instance, with custom variables, you could have javascript trigger events that Google Analytics records, such as clicking a "like" button, that you then use for sorting content when your site is rebuilt.

Advanced sorting

Pairing jekyll-ga with jekyll-sort let's you have content sorted in multiple lists, such as preserving the default chronological sorting of site.posts content lists, while also adding in a site.popular_posts list.

For more on this and other uses, see the readme file for jekyll-ga, and get the plugin on GitHub.

Next Up

The redesign of healthcare.gov will make it easy to discover and consume content by ensuring accessibility, supporting Spanish translations, and now exposing popular content across the site.

We're developing healthcare.gov as a CMS-free Jekyll website in tandem with a new release of Prose, the online editor for Jekyll and GitHub. Stay tuned for more updates on both in the next few days, including a simple web server that lets you run your own on-premises GitHub Pages-like hosting service.

Multilingual Jekyll

Development Seed — 2013-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

Earlier this week we outlined how important it is to provide access for all users, regardless of ability, to the new Healthcare.gov. The website will also feature Spanish translations of all its content, another important step toward achieving full accessibility.

Usually, implementing translated content into a workflow can be a challenging task. Questions arise about administration and management of the content, URL structure, site UI and end user experience. In our latest code sprint on developing the new healthcare.gov, we're tackling this by focusing on creating a sustainable architecture for supporting translation and the workflow for publishing multiple translations.

How to set up a multi-lingual Jekyll site

Jekyll gives us a lot of control over our site's structure, so we're imposing a structure that facilitates managing multilingual content. We developed a sustainable architecture by focusing on three key components:

adding and maintaining content,
translating site elements,
and seamless use for the end user.

Implementing multilingual support with Jekyll can be achieved by adding rules to govern how the site supports translation. Leveraging the YAML front matter for controlling page generation, we can create rules for metadata, url structure, posts with categories, custom paths, and site element translations.

Metadata

Every page is defined by a language key and Jekyll builds the site based on these keys and the structure. Metadata fields are used to define what layout and other information are used to generate a page. All posts must declare a layout and lang field:

---
layout: default
lang: en
---

URL Structure

Translated posts need to have an additional categories field that will be used in the URL. The url structure of healthecare.gov will look like /:categories/:filename-title. For translated content, the url will be /es/title-of-the-page.

---
layout: default
lang: es
categories:
    - es
---

To keep the relationship between translations, both posts must use the same filename. Translated posts are nested in a directory with the language code as a subdirectory. Note, we do not translate file names, and they are never directly seen by end users of the website. This is so that they can be matched for editing in Prose.

/_posts/index.html
/_posts/es/index.html
/_posts/blog/2013-01-01-happy-new-year.md
/_posts/blog/es/2013-01-01-happy-new-year.md

Additional categories can be appended, but using the rule of declaring es first, followed by the necessary categories matching both es and en translations:

---
layout: default
lang: es
categories:
    - es
    - blog
---

Site Elements

Site elements like navigation items or UI controls need a translation as well and can be controlled by posts with global metadata. We tag this post with a translations tag. For any templates that have elements that need translation, we can assign load the global translation data by assigning site translations variable at the top of the page:

{% assign t = site.tags.translations[0] %}

A title element would then look like:

<h1>{{t.[page.lang].landing-page.title}}</h1>

Since each page has a page.lang value, we can find the value we're looking for in the appropriate language following this structure.

The global translations post includes translated version of the title, like this:

en:
    landing-page:
        title: 'Some Title'
es:
    landing-page:
        title: 'Título Ejemplo'

By leveraging these rules and managing translated content in posts and site wide translation files, we keep authoring content simple. Prose, can now be used to create and manage posts and content. The next version of Prose will also have new features to make this process even more easy for content authors. This workflow puts an emphasis on writing content and providing human-translated content across the site.

Next up

We're getting ready to release a Google Analytics plugin for Jekyll. It's a drop-in plugin that will allow you to sort the content on your Jekyll site by any Google Analytics data you specify. We're using it on healthcare.gov to sort content by popularity, so we can surface interesting and useful posts. We're also gearing up for a major new version of Prose, as Tristen outlined a few weeks ago.

Week in DC Tech: April 22

Development Seed — 2013-04-22T00:00:00-07:00

Happy Earth Day DC! This week, there are several great meetups and events, on a wide range of topics including mobile user experience (UX) design, data visualization, business development and more. Tonight, Data Visualization DC kicks off the nationwide Big Data Week, with their meetup at iStrategyLabs.

And if you happen to be in the Chicago area this weekend, join MapBoxers Alex Barth and Tom MacWright at Chicago Hack Week, from Friday April 26th through Sunday April 28th.

Monday, April 22

6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Data Visualization DC: This month, Data Visualization DC in association with Big Data Week present Professor Ben Shneiderman for their Big Data Visualization meetup. Shneiderman will be giving a talk about "Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery: Turning Messy BigData into Actionable SmallData".

6:30 pm - 9:30 pm

Startup Grind DC: This month, Startup Grind DC is featuring Dr. Magid Abraham, CEO and cofounder of Internet Market Intellegence company, comScore. Come learn about Abraham, and how he built comScore into one of the leading internet companies that provides insight for the digital world. The event will be held at 1776.

8:30 pm - 1:30 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session @ UberOffices: This week's Nightowl meetup is going to be held at UberOffices in DC. Ram Singh of 10.io will be running a Lean Canvas business development group during the meetup to assist local startups develop successful business models. As usual, Bring Your Own Project and be prepared to be productive.

Tuesday, April 23rd

6:00 pm

MapStoryDC: The April MapStoryDC meetup is focusing on building the local DC MapStory database. If you are interested in the power of mapping and data visualization - come and put your head together with likeminded individuals to develop some more useful and informative MapStories for the DC region. Some great DC focused MapStories: Commuting by Bike in DC & History of DC Metro Lines. Go to MapStory.org for more.

Wednesday April 24th

6:00 pm

MoDevDC: To prepare for next month's MoDevUX 2013 conference, MoDevDC will focus on mobile UX, design and interface. Samsung Developers will also be joining the meetup to provide a look at some of the latest SDKs available from Samsung. As an added bonus, they will be giving away a Samsung Galaxy device to one lucky attendee, you won't want to miss it!

Thursday, April 25

6:30 pm

OpenStackDC: Join the open-source, cloud software builders of OpenStack for their meetup at The Warehouse Theater. This month, there will be talks using OpenStack in several different capacities from Dr. Steve Crago of USC and the Information Sciences Institute, Drew Dimmick of HP Cloud Services, and more. There will also be an open floor discussion about scaling OpenStack.

Building Accessible Static Sites

Development Seed — 2013-04-17T00:00:00-07:00

Half way into building the new Healthcare.gov, a site to help Americans learn about and find affordable health insurance, we want to update you on an important aspect of designing a government website. Especially given the content of this site is about access to health care, it's incredibly important that it be accessible to all people.

Section 508 is a legal requirement that federal government websites have certain features to help people with disabilities understand them, sometimes while using assistive technology like screen readers.

We've been focusing on 508 testing and compliance from the start. With each code sprint, we're reviewing and addressing accessibility issues as the come up. This process is not native to developing a static website, but it's easy to do, because we're working with such a flexible and simple architecture. There is no rooting around modules and multiple layers of themes to find erroneous markup.

Accessibility as guidelines and law

Providing persons with disabilities access to content on the web or within an application is many times glossed over by developers and designers. A number of organizations and governing bodies, including the U.S. government, have created guidelines and standards in an effort to help ensure that nobody is discriminated when trying to access content on the web.

Section 508 is one standard that is U.S. law and guides much of the public sector content on the web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is another body that has developed guidelines for web content accessibility, which corresponds to much of what Section 508 states. While slight differences exist, overall any guideline states that accessible web content include: text alternatives, keyboard-navigable layouts, meaningful page titles, logical header and sub header progression, and readable content.

In general this is a matter of applying standard HTML syntax — include alt tags, make sure your page is structured, and make sure you label elements.

But as Austin Seraphin writes, in a powerful blog post, "The blind have gotten so used to lofty promises of a dream platform, only to receive some slapped together set of software with a minimally functional screen reader running on overpriced hardware which can’t take a beating."

Auditing ourselves

Our first review using several in-browser accessibility tools, including WAVE from WebAIM, revealed that our initial site development had several issues. We had over 24 accessibility violations and 12 warnings. Most of the errors were due to missing alt text or unlabeled form elements. The warnings mostly dealt with dropdown menus, header items, and javascript interactions — items that some screen readers and accessibility software can't handle.

Take for example a search form element at the top of your page. A quick implementation would look something like this:

<form>
    <input id='footer-email' type='text' placeholder='Email Address' />
</form>

This is one of the most common errors when trying to provide accessible content. A visually-impaired person using a screen-reader will not be able to understand this element because it lacks not only a label element attached to the form element, there is not a title to the form element.

To fix it, a label and/or title can be added as for descriptions of the elements.

<form>
    <label for='footer-email'>Get Email Updates</label>
    <input title='Email Signup Text Box' id='footer-email' type='text' placeholder='Email Address' />
</form>

Putting a focus on accessibility through simplicity

As we've discussed before, going back to the basics and using static site development can help improve accessibility. Our initial audit was the first step in reviewing how we can make the new Healthcare.gov 100% accessible regardless of disability.

Ensuring accessibility can be difficult. A number of considerations must be integrated during original development to ensure that standards are met.

Many times, large CMS-driven sites miss the mark. I audited several large government sites and have consistently found anything from 1 to 16 errors. In general, the most common offense is missing alt text or label for a form. But poor structure, confusing titles, or poor text contrast are also very common warnings that are not necessarily in violation of compliance but decrease access to certain users.

Managing these issues up front and with the simplicity of site templating features from Jekyll, we're seeing how easy it can be to make sure that the new Healthcare.gov is 100% accessible.

Next up

Later this week, we'll dive into another topic about access to content: how to set up a multi-lingual Jekyll site.

Week in DC Tech: April 15

Development Seed — 2013-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

This week's meetups fall into two categories - the thriving startup and commercial tech communities in the city and the open data movement with this Saturday's OpenStreetMap Editathon. Read on for details on each of our event picks for the week, and check back every Monday for a weekly event roundup.

Monday, April 15

8:30 pm - 1:30 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session: The DC Nightowls are holding their after hours productivity session this week at 1776. Bring your own project and plan to work alongside other entrepreneurs. This week's tip? RSVP and show up early, the new venue is drawing a crowd.

Tuesday, April 16

7:00 pm

NetSquared DC: April's NetSquared meetup is featuring the "Best of NTC & SXSW". The meetup will include discussions about this year's SXSW conference as well as the Nonprofit Technology Conference. If you missed the live shows, come and join for a recap of each event's highlights.

Thursday, April 18

6:30 - 8:00

.Gov to .Com - Working in Commercial Technology: This event will feature presentations about the often overlooked commercial software and startup technology sectors in DC. Come and learn about this growing community from talented engineers and developers from around the region.

7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Tech in the City: Continuing the exploration of DC's growing startup scene, this event will feature private and public sector officials discussing smart growth and development, and the benefits of starting a tech company in DC. Come hear about how tech startups are making this city great!

Saturday April 20

12:00 pm - 5:00 pm

OpenStreetMap #Editathon : MapBox is hosting a mapping party as part of the OpenStreetMap US spring #editathon series. Come out to improve road coverage on the map, work with the new iD editor, or map your hometown. People of all skill levels are welcome.

UNHCR Relaunches data.unhcr.org

Development Seed — 2013-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

Last week UNHCR, the United Nation's Refugee Agency, launched a new iteration of data.unhcr.org, along with a significant redesign to its information sharing portals. Providing open data has become a critical tool in UNHCR's response to refugee crises. With 1 million refugees now in Syria, the largest current situation, UNHCR is providing data and operations information through data.unhcr.org to improve coordination and the overall on-the-ground response.

This redesign marks the first release of the work we've been doing with the UNHCR GIS and data team. Here's a quick recap of what's new and a sneak peak at what's to come.

A new data.unhcr.org

The homepage for data.unhcr.org now features a fullscreen global map showing current active emergencies that UNHCR is responding to along with direct access points to the information sharing portals.

Full screen map showing locations active emergencies and information portal links.

Relaunch and redesign of UNHCR open data portals

Information portals provide a critical access and coordination point for UNHCR and its operational partners, as well as serve as the primary resource for up-to-date data about demographics and operations around a crises. The redesign refreshed critical UI components to improve the experience in accessing and using the portal, and is the first step in improving the way UNHCR shares data with its partners and the public.

A view of the Syria Regional Refugee Response page.

What's to come

Last week's launch of the improved homepage and rebranding of information portals is just the beginning of the work UNHCR has planned. Here's what else is in the works.

1. Improved situation map on portal pages

The situation map provides much needed geographical context into an emergency. Key demographic data and operational data can be shown as an overview to the situation and provide quick access to the data. In addition to a redesign of the map, more data layers will be available to browse including demographic data at the camp and regional level, along with operational data showing relief activities and critical infrastructure data.

2. Custom embeds of situation map

The situation map will have custom embed options to quickly integrate its data outside of the information portal. These embeds will give anyone the ability to quickly integrate current maps and data into their own site, news articles, or blog posts.

3. New layers on data.unhcr.org

The landing page for data.unhcr.org will be updated with new layers outlining current global data and activities. These new layers will provide an initial understanding of where and how UNHCR is responding to refugee crises around the world and serve as a portal to global information about humanitarian crises.

4. Data API

Demographic and operational datasets will be available for download and as JSON & GeoJSON endpoints in a fully built out API. The same data that powers the maps will be fully available for integration into an application or visualization. This furthers the ability to provide coordination with direct access to data.

It's been awesome working with the UNHCR team and helping them improve a critical resource in emergency operations. To learn more or donate to the work UNHCR is doing in Syria and around the world, visit donate.unhcr.org.

Week in DC Tech: April 1

Development Seed — 2013-04-02T00:00:00-07:00

Happy April! It's a busy start to the month in the DC technology space with meetups from GeoDC, the DC Web API group, and others plus DC Startup Weekend. If you're interested in learning more about mapping and GIS, building mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms, and the latest advances in APIs, check out the meetups happening in and around the city this week.

For anyone in the Bay Area, tonight (Tuesday, April 2) John will be at the San Francisco Geo Meetup talking about iD, the new editor for OpenStreetMap.

Read on for our roundup of technology events in Washington, DC this week and check back weekly for the latest on local events.

Wednesday, April 3

7:00 - 9:00 pm

Geo DC Meetup: This month's meetup will feature lightning talks on legal and policy issues in the GIS community, public transportation mapping initiatives in Honduras, and mapping mobile phone calls around elections. Bobby from our team will talk about the location sharing iOS app MeatText.

7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

NoVA Web Development Meetup: This month's meeting will be all about mobile apps with Garrett talking about his experience building out MeatText to let people share their location in fun and interesting ways. Yep, that means two talks on MeatText just a few blocks away from each other.

8:30 pm - 1:30 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session: For those in the community with barely a moment to spare during the day, DC Nightowls Coworking Sessions are made specifically for you! This late night meetup is BYOP - Bring Your Own Project - and a great way to connect with like minded (busy) people in the DC tech community.

Thursday, April 4

6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

DC Web API Meetup: Interested in APIs? This meetup will bring out speakers from the White House and its We The People API, Seabourne Consulting, and Chris from MapBox, who will talk about his experience retrieving bulk data from government geoportals. After short presentations, there will be a moderated panel on where APIs in the government and private sector should be headed.

Friday, April 5 to Sunday, April 7

DC Startup Weekend: Thinking of kicking off your own business or getting involved in a startup? This 54 hour event will bring together entrepreneurs to build a company in a weekend.

Healthcare.gov Featured on FedOSS Podcast

Development Seed — 2013-04-02T00:00:00-07:00

Check out the new FedOSS podcast where I discuss with hosts Luke Fretwell and Gunnar Hellekson the philosophy and technology behind CMS-free websites. We cover how CMS-free websites using Jekyll, Prose, and GitHub work, when they make sense, and why they're really fast and secure.

Cover image by billselak, CC BY-ND 2.0.

Building a New Prose

Development Seed — 2013-03-20T00:00:00-07:00

For many of the sites we build Jekyll is a prominent tool we use to build dynamic sites served by static pages. When we launched Prose last year, we set out to build a lightweight editor to create and manage Jekyll sites hosted on GitHub. We open sourced Prose, and the response from the GitHub community was overwhelming. Prose is a project with over 900 followers, and many actively use it each day.

Along with the relaunch of Healthcare.gov in June, we will dedicate time to improving the user experience and reliability of Prose, as well as adding new features.

This new version will also establish a clear direction to move forward - to make Prose a great interface for authoring content. We will focus Prose entirely on writing Markdown based documents, streamlining the interface for content creators.

A New Interface

As part of envisioning a new version of Prose, we have started on wireframes. You can view the entire set on Flickr, and below are an early look at key screens.

Authenticated Landing Page

For logged in users, the landing page features a filterable directory of projects per organization.

Project Page Settings

The project settings panel controls page deletion, publishes modes, and sets front matter values in clean form fields populated by a project schema.

Project Page Settings Prototype

Here's a more detailed version of the page settings panel with vertical navigation.

These wires should represent an interface that has a good balance between users belonging to many projects and organizations or just one. Filenames and directories should be quickly scannable and filterable through autocomplete search. Filenames can be long and there can be many per directory. The interface should scale to accommodate volume and have subtle styled queues when content would otherwise overflow. The main navigation in the wires is presented in a vertical format and split into page level sections. It scales depending on the context of the page:

Main Navigation
- Authenticated Landing

Project Navigation
- Project Page - Create New File

Page Navigation - Editing - Preview - Media/Assets - Page Settings

New features

Prose already provides the ability to specify configurable options in _config.yml

auto: true
server: true
prose: 
    rooturl: '_posts'
    metadata:
        - name: layout
          field:
            element: select
            defaultText: 'Select a Layout'
            options:
              - value: default
              - value: page

We want to expand on this by providing developers a way to specify a project schema in YAML that props up a sandboxed world of a site, free of system files. A metadata schema provides helpful defaults to YAML front matter, specifies an element type, and lists out values available to the site. Other ideas include specifying an assets directory for images or media.

We will also enhance the editing interface overall, including improving markup formatting and building out a simple mechanism to drop in images or media into a page.

Stay tuned. Work will begin in the master branch of Prose on GitHub - watch there for new development.

Prose users: Let us know your thoughts over on GitHub

New Healthcare.gov is Open, CMS-Free

Development Seed — 2013-03-12T00:00:00-07:00

Update: Listen to a podcast on our work developing the new healthcare.gov and how CMS-free websites are a great fit for federal websites.

At a South by Southwest event this weekend, Department of Heath and Human Services CTO Bryan Sivak outlined a new vision for healthcare.gov. As the primary interface for the public to learn about and shop for health insurance plans through the Health Insurance Marketplace, healthcare.gov will relaunch this June with a completely rethought design and architecture.

The new healthcare.gov follows our CMS-free philosophy. It will be a completely static website, generated by Jekyll, moving away from content management systems, which Bryan describes as "complicated to configure, complicated to setup, and add unnecessary overhead." Website generators like Jekyll work by combining template files with content and rendering them to static html pages. They provide the best balance between content creation and editing flexibility, serving an incredibly fast and reliable website.

The code for the website will be open in two important ways. First, Bryan pledged, "everything we do will be published on GitHub," meaning the entire code-base will be available for reuse. This is incredibly valuable because some states will set up their own state-based health insurance marketplaces. They can easily check out and build upon the work being done at the federal level. GitHub is the new standard for sharing and collaborating on all sorts of projects, from city geographic data and laws to home renovation projects and even wedding planning, as well as traditional software projects.

Moreover, all content will be available through a JSON API, for even simpler reusability. Other government or private sector websites will be able to use the API to embed content from healthcare.gov. As official content gets updated on healthcare.gov, the updates will reflect through the API on all other websites. The White House has taken the lead in defining clear best practices for web APIs.

Healthcare.gov content editors will use an improved Prose.io to create and manage content across the site. We're working with HHS to determine priorities for Prose, including better previewing, a refined user interface, and a user-friendly metadata editor. The enhancements will roll out over the next few months leading up to the relaunch of healthcare.gov.

Eschewing the complexity of a content management system frees time to invest in a better design and content experience, as well as greatly simplifies the maintenance overhead of running a website. We estimate the cms-free healthcare.gov will require approximately 30 less servers than current cms-based implementations in the department. That's because no matter how many visits the website gets, we only require one server to pre-generate the website's content and push it to a content distribution network for public access.

We're excited to partner with the HHS team to offer strategic support for a completely new and open source healthcare.gov. And as employees of a small business, we can't wait to use the new health insurance marketplace at the beginning of next year to access more affordable health insurance options.

We'll post more updates over the next few months as this project develops.

Guinea Opens Mining Contracts

Development Seed — 2013-02-19T00:00:00-08:00

As Reuters just reported, Guinea is opening up all mining contracts. ContratsMiniersGuinee.org is the new open data sites opening more than 70 historical mining contracts, including the contracts signed under the military rule before president Alpha Conde's 2010 election. This open data push is part of the Government's technical committee to review mining contracts - and will be the place where all future mining contracts are published. We worked with Revenue Watch and the World Bank, the main advisors to the Guinean Government, to create the site - our goal was to make it easy to navigate and sorted though all these PDFs.

Leveraging Document Cloud

The site was all built on Document Cloud, a great open source project that enables interaction and direction for what can often be unnavigable PDFs.

The government can now easily maintain all the mining contracts by simply uploading them to their own Document Cloud account, where they can then use the powerful annotation and tagging tools that Document Cloud opens up. All documents have metadata attached to them via Document Cloud's API, letting us build an light filtering interface to search and filter documents by year, resource type, and contract type, as seen on the document listing page below.

All annotations to the contracts are linked, letting users jump right into the highlighted parts of the contracts, something traditionally really hard to do with PDFs. Click the image below to jump to the document preview page, which provides a jumping point into any section of the contract.

Building static sites

The open source work of Document Cloud, first funded by the Knight Foundation, powers our continued move towards building light static sites integrating productized software services. As Dave Cole recently blogged about, we have shifted our focus to building static sites with tools like Jekyll or Backbone.js instead of CMS-driven applications.

This gives us the room to focus on design and performance, while depending on the open source community and hosted services for tools that give us dynamic content integration. We anticipate many more opportunities to power our sites with Document Cloud as additional governments and organizations move towards transparent reporting.

Week in DC Tech: February 4

Development Seed — 2013-02-04T00:00:00-08:00

As usual there is a lot going on in the technology space this week in Washington, DC, from lighting talks on big geodata to social co-working to nerdy drinking. Below is our roundup of events happening this week. Check back every week for a summary of the local technology events that caught our eye.

Tuesday, February 5

6:30 - 8:00 pm

Beers & Betas 3: Hinge: Like new apps, devices, ideas, and beer? Come out for this event to be pitched by a local startup, asked for your feedback on the tool, and given beer to loosen your lips.

Wednesday, February 6

7:00 - 9:00 pm

GeoDC Meetp: This month's GeoDC meetup is all about big geo data, with talks on data scaling, data styling, and data visualizing and analyzing. Come out to learn something new and meet folks interested in mapping, GIS, and geography.

8:30 pm - 2:00 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session: Check out Canvas.co and nclud's co-working space while spending some time working on your latest idea with a group of other hard workers and entrepreneurs at this late night co-working session.

Saturday, February 9

9:00 am - 5:00 pm

ErlangDC: Come out to this one day conference all on Erlang that will intro you to the basics of the Erlang programming language or let you deep dive into hands on workshops and discussions for the more experienced.

6:30 pm

Nerd Nite DC: Like to kick off your Saturday night by learning something? This month's Nerd Nite will teach you about nerds in love, space dust, bilingualism on the brain, and the impending superbug of doom, with bursts of local music in between.

Week in DC Tech: January 28

Development Seed — 2013-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

Want to give coding in Python a try, meet other women working in geo, learn about linked data, or just work with some like-minded creators? These technology events and more are happening this week in Washington, DC. Read on for details, and check back weekly for our roundup of local technology events.

Monday, January 28

8:30 pm - 2:00 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session: Want to pitch your latest idea to creators and entrepreneurs, and get some work done on it? Check out this co-working session to be held at Uber's offices.

Tuesday, January 29

6:00 - 8:00 pm

Women in GIS Happy Hour: This happy hour will bring together ladies working in mapping, geography, cartography, and related fields. Come out to share your experience and meet others in the space.

6:30 - 8:30 pm

Linked Data Meetup: Want to learn more about the linked data model and related best practices for publishing data online? Come out for this meetup for a practical talk about linked data and how and why you should use it.

Saturday, February 2

1:30 pm

DC PyLadies Hack Day: Want to dive into Python? Come out for this hack day to meet other female Python programmers, go through some tutorials, or share what you know with the group. All skill levels welcome.

Week in DC Tech: Inauguration Day Edition

Development Seed — 2013-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

While Washington, DC is calming down after a weekend of Inauguration festivities, the local tech scene is heating back up after the holidays. There are meetups this week on Node.js, jQuery, and international development technology, plus a full weekend of events with the OpenStreetMap editathon plus more hackathon and social coding gatherings. Below is our roundup of events happening this week in Washington, DC.

Wednesday, January 23

6:00 - 8:00 pm

DevCliches Happy Hour: We've all heard an elevator pitch or project idea that sounds, well familiar. This is your chance to have fun with the all too familiar practice, and learn what not to say to make yourself stand out from the crowd in the international development space.

7:00 pm

NodeDC Meetup: Interested in node.js and building fast applications in the server-side JavaScript environment? Come out for talks on how to get started using node in production, what's new in node streams, and to see some fun examples of it use.

Thursday, January 24

6:00 - 8:00 pm

DC jQuery Meetup: This month's jQuery meetup will look at how the Atlantic Wire's HTML5 iPad app was built. Expect a technical walk through on how the app was architected and developed, and the challenges and successes that developers ran into along the way.

Saturday, January 26

9:00 - 4:00 pm

Domestic Violence Hackathon: Interested in putting your technical and design skills to use building tools to help combat and help with the aftermath of domestic violence? Hackathon events will take place in six Latin American countries and Washington, DC this weekend.

10:00 am

DC Python Group Coding Session: Want to help the Python project while honing your coding skills with a group of other Python developers? Come out to this social coding session to get some work done while meeting new people.

Noon - 6:00 pm

OpenStreetMap Editathon: Communities all over the United States will be getting together to make map coverage on OpenStreetMap better this weekend. Come out to improve your town, enter road and directional data, and whatever else is needed while learning how to improve OpenStreetMap and how to use its free data. We'll be hosting the DC event at the MapBox office.

Looking for Mapping + Data Intern

Development Seed — 2013-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

In response to the growing scale of our projects, we're looking for a mapping and data intern to join our team this spring. This paid, full-time internship will focus on designing maps in TileMill and researching and processing large data sets to develop meaningful visualizations.

You will be working with an awesome team and your work will be tightly integrated with the projects. Our team's backgrounds include philosophy, art, education, computer science, and much more. Our diverse experiences are united by our passion for learning whatever it takes to get the job done. This requires constantly teaching ourselves new skills, strong communication, dedication, creativity, and always working in teams.

Our recent projects have ranged from visualizing $5.8 million of funding from UNDP to agglomerating news stories on deforestation in the Amazon region to building a platform for tracking human rights abuses in Syria. Check out our blog for more examples of our work.

More details on the internship and instructions on how to apply are here.

OpenStreetMap tracing sprint with the data team.

Week in DC Tech: January 14

Development Seed — 2013-01-14T00:00:00-08:00

Want to learn more about typography, behavior-based design and UX, or how agile thinking applies to life outside of software development? Then check out some of the technology events happening this week in Washington, DC for developers and non-developers alike. Our weekly roundup is below. Check back every Monday for our tech event picks of the week.

Monday, January 14

6:30 - 8:30 pm

Experiments in Typography: This Knowledge Commons DC class will look at how typography can improve written word's message, looking at examples from present day and back in history.

8:30 pm - 2:00 am

DC Nightowls Co-working Session: It's BYOProject - bring your project and be ready to work on it into the night with a group of likeminded people. You'll have a chance to pitch your project to the group at 9:30 pm, and have short discussions then.

Tuesday, January 15

6:30 - 8:00 pm

Action Design DC: Living Social will present on their research into product development around people's daily behavior, and how they're crafting products and their user experience around it.

7:00 pm

DC Agile Software Testing Group: This month's presentation will look at agile from beyond a software development perspective, discussing why we build things the way we do and how agile plays into that. If you like to iterate, come out to this meetup.

Wednesday, January 16

6:30 pm

DC MongoDB Users Group: Want to learn how to enable data agility with Pig, Hadoop, mongoDB, and other tools, or just get a primer on these technologies? Come out for this meetup and to meet other MongoDB developers.

Week in DC Tech: January 7

Development Seed — 2013-01-07T00:00:00-08:00

The New Year kicks off with several interesting technology events happening in Washington, DC. Get back into the thick of things by getting out, learning something new, and meeting people in the local tech scene. Our weekly roundup of the week's events is below.

Tuesday, January 8

6:30 pm

ONA DC: Want to hear about the latest ways the Washington Post is using technology to improve its new coverage? Come out for this meetup to hear about their biggest successes from 2012 and what's to come this year.

7:00 - 9:00 pm

DC Tech Meetup: Come out to this meetup to see demos from five local tech startups, and then hear pitches from seven investors on what they're doing and why you should take their money.

Wednesday, January 9

7:00 - 9:00 pm

GeoDC Meetup: Want to learn about satellites and what sort of imagery is being collected and available? Come to GeoDC to hear talks from two satellite companies and one on the publicly available imagery and how you can use it in your maps.

Thursday, January 10

6:30 pm

R Meetup: We all know the government collects a lot of data, often times through surveys. Find out how this information is being processed and analyzed using R.

Check back next Monday for our weekly roundup of technology events happening in Washington, DC.

Week in DC Tech: December 17

Development Seed — 2012-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

Before officially kicking off your holiday celebrations, head out to a technology event to learn something interesting and meet new people. Below is our recap of technology events happening this week in Washington, DC. Our next post will highlight what's kicking off 2013 in the local tech scene. Happy holidays!

Tuesday, December 18

6:00 - 8:00 pm

NetSquared DC Happy Hour: NetSquared's happy hour will together people working in nonprofit technology to share experiences, knowledge, and some holiday cheer before the end of the year wraps out. Come out to say hi to friends and meet new people.

6:30 - 8:30 pm

Political Campaign Data Science Meetup: Four people involved in data in the 2012 presidential campaign - as campaign staff, political writers, and academics - will talk about how data was used and its values in campaigns at this meetup. Come for a lively discussion, followed by drinks.

Wednesday, December 19

8:30 pm - 2:00 am

DC Nightowls: The last group late night co-working session of the year is this coming Wednesday at OPower. Join DC Nightowls to work on your own project, share ideas with other entrepreneurs, and get some work done before the holidays.

Thursday, December 20

7:00 - 9:00 pm

Digital Cultural Heritage DC Meetup: This event will feature presentations on neogeography, or mapping your personal history, and web archiving, using the Library of Congress and it's massive collection as a use case.

Week in DC Tech: December 10

Development Seed — 2012-12-10T00:00:00-08:00

In between holiday parties, squeeze in some technology events to learn more about topics like OpenStreetMap, jQuery, data analysis with R, and Ada Lovelace. Below is a roundup of technology events happening in Washington, DC this week. Check back weekly for news on the latest tech happenings in the city.

Monday, December 10

6:30 - 8:45 pm

R Users DC: Hadley Wickham, developer of more than 30 R packages to facilitate data munging, analysis and visualization, will present at this meetup, giving his take on best practices and the future of data analysis.

7:00 pm

Wikimedia DC: Wikimedia is throwing a birthday party for Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer and first female open source developer. Celebrate with the group at Busboys & Poets tonight.

Tuesday, December 11

7:00 pm

Mappy Hour: Mappy Hours, gathering of contributors to OpenStreetMap to talk about recent projects over beers, are resuming in DC, with this one held at Capitol City Brewing Company. Specifically they'll talk about the recent mapping party to add details to the OSM map of Hyattsville, MD, its results, and plans for the next event.

Thursday, December 13

7:00 - 9:00 pm

DCjQ Meetup: This month the DC jQuery group is going back to the basics, giving the second part of a two-part series looking at the basics of jQuery for new users. Slides on part one are available here.

Saturday, December 15

7:00 pm

ONA's Holiday Party: Come out to celebrate the year, meet journalists publishing online, and talk about data driven journalism, data visualization and storytelling, and other ways technology is changing journalism. No presentations, just a party.

Advancing Openness in International Development

Development Seed — 2012-12-05T00:00:00-08:00

We're heading down to USAID today to participate in the launch of the Making All Voices Count: A Grand Challenge for Development, a new public-private partnership aimed to support innovative technology solutions for open government, transparency, and accountability. We're excited to join this conversation and talk about the future of openness in development.

A view of Benghazi in the new MapBox Satellite imagery, made entirely of open data.

Alex, DJ, and I will be at the launch joining USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, Madeleine Albright, and a host of other development leaders. We'll be showcasing some of the latest tools we've been developing, including public aerial imagery with the launch of MapBox Satellite and UNDP's new open data portal.

After the morning forum, we'll have a table to demo our recent projects and continue the conversation. If you're down at the event, stop by and say hello or reach out to me on Twitter at @nas_smith if you want to talk.

Week in DC Tech: December 3

Development Seed — 2012-12-03T00:00:00-08:00

Before the holiday party season gets completely underway, take advantage of your free time and check out some of the technology events happening in the city. This week there is a ton going on with meetups on everything from mapping personal data to productizing open datasets to analyzing design to improve the user experience, happy hours for ICT professionals, developer get togethers, and entrepreneur sessions. Below is a roundup of events happening this week. Check back weekly for our local technology roundup.

Monday, December 3

6:30 pm

Action Design DC: User behavior is crucial in almost any field, and a focal point for many people's work. This meetup will bring together people working in analyzing and improving user experience on the UX, data, and behavioral sides to share experiences and lessons learned.

Tuesday, December 4

7:00 pm

DC Python Meetup: Interested in learning more about Python, seeing examples of it in use, or talking with other developers? Then come out to this meetup held at the Science Club.

Wednesday, December 5

6:00 - 9:00 pm

ICT4Drinks: Come out for this happy hour with folks working in international development and technology, and this month specifically around the issue of mHealth - the use of cell phones in healthcare services.

6:30 pm

Data Business DC: For its second meetup, the group will look at how companies are taking open data around politics, health, and public transit and building for profits tools and services around them. A representative from the city of Baltimore will talk about how and why the city opens its data and the advantages of this secondary market.

Tech Cocktail Session: When you start a business, one of - if not the - most important piece is growing your team. This event will bring out several entrepreneurs who have successfully done this to share their tips around building a team, implementing team culture, and turning an idea into something backed by a workforce.

7:00 pm

GeoDC Meetup: This meetup will look at ways that people are mapping data collected in their day to day life and the tools they're using to do this. Come out to hear how people are mapping their training for a marathon, their travel, and votes of people in general. As usual, there will be lots of time after the presentations for conversations with the community.

Saturday, December 8

10:15 am - 4:30 pm

Fosterly's Open Study Hall: Open Study Hall is your chance to sit down with entrepreneurs at all levels in the product development cycle, pick their brains, share your ideas and experiences, and more than anything collaborate and feed of each others energy. Bring your laptop and your questions.

UNDP Opens Up Funding Data Across 6,000+ Projects

Development Seed — 2012-11-29T00:00:00-08:00

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) just launched open.undp.org, a project and funding data browser that maps 6,000+ projects in 177 countries and discloses more than $5.8 billion in funding. This is a big step in the open data space. The new site uses state of the art web technology to improve international aid by exposing vital information in a visually compelling fashion and machine readable formats. Open.undp.org is a significant new web property in the United Nations family that shows the growing traction of organizations embracing web technology to further aid transparency and accountability. Its launch comes in the same year as the UNDP's start to disclose project information under the standards of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)

Front page of open.undp.org

This is the most powerful and fastest project browser we have ever built, letting users drill into any funding category, any country, and by any donor or recipient, all the way down to an individual project's finances and the outcomes that it is producing. And most importantly, every view, facet, and project is linkable via a sensible URL that appears in the browser's address bar. This URL can be easily shared using any means of electronic communications. While not rocket science, this is key for making open.undp.org a solid reference resource in a world where almost all communication is on the web.

Flat and fast

The site is designed to be more like an app - light and fast - letting users quickly filter across everything. With open.undp.org we further pursue our philosophy of CMS free websites. The site is all built in HTML, JavaScript, and JSON-formatted data, hosted on GitHub pages and compiled by Jekyll. This approach allows for an incredibly robust and fast architecture. There is no database behind the site. There is no dynamic page generation server-side - it's all static. Backbone.js is used to manage the data and the many ways it is displayed and updated. The updating workflow is simple - the UN exports their data from their existing Oracle-based data warehouse, runs a simple script that generates the JSON files that power open.undp.org, and uploads them to the site. We will follow up with more technical details in a future post.

Access to raw data, openly licensed

All information on open.undp.org can be downloaded or accessed via a RESTful API in CSV or JSON formats for quick reuse in Spreadsheet programs like Excel or custom applications. The data is openly licensed, merely requiring attribution to use in any commercial or non-commercial scenario.

Download dialog on open.undp.org

2013 Goals

Starting in early 2013, the site will be updated quarterly and all 2012 data will be added (currently only 2011 data in included). Previously UNDP published a data set for 2009-2010 annually, as a spreadsheet. UNDP Administrator Helen Clark noted:

“We are committed to working in the open, and we will continue improving the quality, quantity, and timeliness of our reporting so that our partners can monitor their investments in fighting poverty, supporting human development, and securing a sustainable future for all.”

Working with the UNDP open data and communication team over the past three months has been incredible. They embraced a highly minimalist app design and UI and were able to run incredibly fast in opening up their data. We are excited to see where they take this site in the future.

Site highlights

Front page

The homepage shows a map of projects around the world, indicating where the most money is being spent.

Filtering

Projects can be filtered by selecting an item in one or more categories. In this example we seleced the Afghanistan country office plus funding sources from the United States.

Every Project

Also available is a searchable and sortable list of each individual project included in the current filter. Here we see projects in Afghanistan that are being contributed to by U.S. sources, sorted by total budget.

Project Pages

Clicking on a project title will load that project's specific details. These pages include the project's timeline, financial data, related documents, relative tweets and photos, and each individual output.

Check out open.undp.org to explore the data and visualizations.

Week in DC Tech: November 26

Development Seed — 2012-11-26T00:00:00-08:00

Once you've gotten back into the swing of things after the Thanksgiving holiday, check out the two main events happening in Washington, DC this week. Tech@State, a two day event around technology for international development, is looking at how technology can be used around elections, while Rootscamp, a two day unconference, will bring together organizers to talk campaign strategy on the heels of the U.S. election. More details on both are below.

Friday, November 30

8:45 am - 4:30 pm

Tech@State:ElecTech: This Tech@State is focused entirely on elections and how technology can be used to improve executing, monitoring, fraud prevention, and more. We'll be there talking about building an open data infrastructure for elections, specifically in Afghanistan, and monitoring results and our recent maps of the U.S. election with USA TODAY.

9:00 am - 5:00 pm

RootsCamp: Campaigners and organizers will be gathering this Friday and Saturday to rehash lessons learned this election season. The unconference will cover strategies and approaches that worked and ones that bombed and technologies and infrastructures that were awesome or needed improvement. Chris will be there to talk about finding, analyzing, and publishing open data sets and how to visualize them with MapBox tools.

Saturday, December 1

9:00 am - 4:00 pm

Tech@State Unconference: This casual follow up to Friday's event will allow participants to sit down, have conversations around themes that emerged the day before, and do some hands on workshops and trainings around implementing technology for elections. It's a great opportunity to dive deeper into specific strategies and tools with others working around common problems.

Week in DC Tech: November 12

Development Seed — 2012-11-12T00:00:00-08:00

Want to learn how to tell stories through maps and design, learn from others mistakes, or find out more about technologies like Node.js, jQuery, and MongoDB? Then head out to these meetups happening this week in Washington, DC.

Monday, November 12

7:00 pm

DCjQuery: Back to the Basics: This month's jQuery meetup will take it back to the beginning, with a presentation around how to use jQuery and contribute to it for the novice. If you've been wanting to dive into jQuery programming, this will walk you through how to get started.

Tuesday, November 13

7:00 pm

NodeDC Meetup: Four speakers will talk about how they're using Node.js in their projects, like powering Social Tables and SpanishDict, Node Knockout projects, and more. Come out to learn more about node and meet developers working with it.

MapStorytelling & GeoNoVA Crossover: In this meetup, Liz Lyon will talk about MapStory and the project's goal of getting more people to share their stories through maps. The GeoNoVa crowd will also be out for the meetup.

Wednesday, November 14

6:30 pm

MongoDC Meetup: This month's MongoDB meetup will feature presentations on the product road map for MongoDB and the process of migrating from RDBMS to MongoDB and the tool it spawned.

ONA DC: Design is How It Works: This month's Online News Association meetup will have David Wright, the digital design director for NPR, talk about how design plays into the storytelling experience in a newsroom and how this translates both technologically and visually.

Friday, November 16

6:00 - 9:00 pm

Fail Faire DC: This event takes the unique approach of looking at - and even celebrating - failure, as a way for everyone to learn from a big mistake. 12 speakers will take the stage to talk about how they messed up big and how we can all learn from it. Tickets are sold out, but there are still spots available on the wait list.

Open Source Map Training at Tech Camp Morocco

Development Seed — 2012-11-12T00:00:00-08:00

I'm spending this week in Rabat training and talking about open source mapping tools at TechCamp Morocco. This is the latest TechCamp taking place in North Africa with participants from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt. TechCamps continue to be a source of learning about and sharing ideas around technology and new tools for civil society organizations. I'll be there training people on how to make maps with TileMill and discussing how organizations can tell stories with data and use open source mapping tools to improve understanding and decision making.

Free and open source mapping tools and data continue to be a great access point for organizations with limited resources to share and publish stories around their work and field. As the world has seen across North Africa and the Middle East in the past two years, publishing and sharing information has helped tell the stories of change within each country. The Syria Justice and Accountability Center continues to map violence and human rights data data across Syria, HarassMap maps and documents sexual harassment incidences across Cairo and Egypt, and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team maps health facilities in OpenStreetMap in Libya.

Map of Fes, one of the oldest and second largest cities in Morocco, where I did some OpenStreetMap mapping this weekend.

As TechCamp Morocco convenes tomorrow, participants will be engaging in discussions and learning how to use low-cost and open source tools for the work they do in their communities. I'll be leading trainings on how to use data and maps within their work. Making custom maps with TileMill and other open source technologies continue to enable organizations to approach problems in completely new ways.

We're excited to be here to lead trainings and discuss with organizations across North Africa in how they use maps to tell stories and understand their work better. I'll be tweeting from the TechCamp at @nas_smith if you want to follow along.

InfoAmazonia Now Maps Deforestion in All Nine Amazonian Countries

Development Seed — 2012-11-09T00:00:00-08:00

InfoAmazonia now maps deforestation data for the entire Amazon basin dating back to 2004, revealing how forest loss patterns play out in different countries. When O Eco, Knight-ICFJ, and Internews first launched InfoAmazonia ahead of the Rio+20 earlier this year, deforestation data was only available for Brazil. This addition brings deforestation data from all nine Amazonian countries into one map, using data from Terra-i. Now journalists and others can locate deforestation information across the region in diverse political, social, and environmental contexts.

Through InfoAmazonia's partnership with Terra-i, we get this deforestation dataset as clipped shapefiles, allowing for integration with other data sources like INPE that were already included in InfoAmazonia's deforestation map and updated monthly.

With Terra-i processing the data for us, I pulled the shapefiles directly into TileMill for styling. Since the data contains a column called xtra1_YEAR describing the year each area was deforested, it's easy to highlight the most recent changes with some simple CartoCSS:

#ternobra {
  polygon-opacity:1;
  polygon-fill:#ffd500;
  line-color:#ffd500;
  [xtra1_YEAR = 2012] { 
    polygon-fill:#ff2c00;
    line-color:#ff2c00;
  }
}

The new Terra-i layer is then uploaded to our MapBox account, and overlayed with the other deforestation layers using the MapBox API.

We'll be updating deforestation data on InfoAmazonia every three months, in sync with Terra-i releases. Deforestation data for Brasil from INPE will continue to be updated monthly, in addition to the latest stories from O Eco and others.

Realtime Election Results Map

Development Seed — 2012-11-06T00:00:00-08:00

It's election day in the United States, so go vote now! Then come back and watch the results come in tonight with us on USATODAY.com. There you'll find dynamic interactive maps visualizing the latest election results data in realtime. The results page is responsively designed to fit tablets and modern smart phones, as well as standard computer browsers.

In addition to live data layers overlaying MapBox maps, one of the feature we're most excited about is a live update feed that brings you highlights derived directly from the data throughout the night such as when any race is won, a state swings its vote to another party for president, and new results start coming in. All map and table views have persistent URLs, so you can share a link to anything you like.

We had a great time partnering with the talented team at USA TODAY to build a responsive dynamic mapping platform and realtime election dashboard. Check it out and let us know what you think on Twitter at @developmentseed. Results will start coming in around 7pm.

Week in DC Tech: November 5

Development Seed — 2012-11-05T00:00:00-08:00

It's a big week here in Washington, DC. First, DC Week - our annual technology and arts celebration - is underway, with a full schedule of community events, conference sessions, and parties scattered around the city. Then, of course, tomorrow is Election Day! Remember to vote, and to head to your favorite bar to watch the results come in. Below is our roundup of recommended technology events happening this week, and we recommend you check out DC Week's full schedule.

Monday, November 5

6:45 pm

DT:DC: Designing DC Focused Design Challenges: This event from the DT:DC design thinking meetup group will look at the steps and tools needed to define a problem and create and refine a design challenge to meet it. If you're interested in design methodology and what goes into design challenges, check this event out.

Wednesday, November 7

6:30 pm

NoVa Node Meetup: After being postponed due to Sandy last week, NoVa Node will get together to look at a case study of deploying node.js in production.

7:00 - 9:00 pm

GeoDC Meetup on Election Mapping: Right on the heels of Election Day, the GeoDC group will look at how two major news sources - USA Today and the Washington Post - mapped election results and used maps and graphs in their overall coverage.

7:00 - 9:00 pm

DC Week Keynotes: Come out to hear some inspiring talks from people leading local start up companies like Uber, Buzzcar, and the Girl Effect on what they do, how they got there, and why they do it. DC Mayor Vincent Gray will kick off the talks, and hopefully talk a bit about what he's doing to foster the tech community here in town.

Thursday, November 8

6:00 pm

DC Week Tech Cocktail: Tech Cocktail brings together tech entrepreneurs, developers, designers, investors, and employers looking to mix and mingle over drinks. If this sounds like you, come out to meet some new people and get introduced to a handful a tech startups featured in their showcase.

Friday, November 9

8:00 pm

DC Week Closing Party: DC Week will come to a close this Friday and go out with a bang - and a big party. Come out to celebrate with tech folks, enjoy the open bar, rock out to live music, and check out an art show.

Week in DC Tech: Sandy Edition

Development Seed — 2012-10-29T00:00:00-07:00

While almost everything in Washington, DC is closed today and likely tomorrow, there are still some great technology (and other) events happening later this week to liven things up post-Sandy. Our roundup is below.

Tuesday, October 30

9:00 pm

High Heel Race: This annual tradition of queens dressing to the nines and racing down 17th Street is still on for this Tuesday, with a potential postponement until Thursday if the bad weather persists. There's no place in DC where you'll see better makeup and costumes.

6:30 pm

NoVA Node Meetup: The Northern Viriginia node.js group will look at deploying node in production through the case study of SpanishDict's new text-to-speech service. Check for updates tomorrow on whether this meetup is still happening or postponed.

Friday, November 2

8:00 pm - midnight

DCWEEK Opening Party: DC's week long technology and design festival kicks off with a party that will bring folks out to network and have fun over drinks and live music.

This Weekend

10:00 am - 6:00 pm

DCWEEK Hackathon: This hackathon brings together developers, designers, and the pitchers to come up with a project idea and execute a first iteration - all in the name of cash prices and a chance to bring it to the next level.

Opening Oil Spill Data in Nigeria

Development Seed — 2012-10-23T00:00:00-07:00

The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) in Nigeria is in the process of opening up the past six years of oil spill incidences and remediation data in an effort to create transparency and collaboration and improve the process in which spills are managed and cleaned up. I'm in Abuja all week working with NOSDRA mapping this oil spill data, all part of the great work the Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN) and other partners like Revenue Watch and the Facility for Oil Spill Transparency and Reform (FOSTER) have been leading.

The effects of these oil spills can be devastating. In 2012 already, there have been 619 spills reported and the management of the identification, assessment, and clean up of these spills is critical for a timely and effective response. Opening oil spill data and creating a collaborative open data space is part of a larger effort to change the way oil spills are managed across the country. By pushing an environment of open data, NOSDRA and SDN are trying to do more with data and open source tools and create a transparent space in the oil pollution sector. The NOSDRA team is excited about the possibilities of what open data can do and is gearing up to release more data and more maps.

This morning's meetings with NOSDRA and SDN team members discussing potential map ideas.

I'm here all week meeting with the team, training on open source mapping tools like TileMill, and having discussions around the data collection to map design process for opening data and mapping to share results and analysis. The NOSDRA team is gearing up to launch all the data and maps in a few weeks. We're excited to be partners here in helping the Nigerian Government open critical data. Here is a preview of the maps we are making this week.

Preview of the oil spill data to be released.

Week in DC Tech: October 22

Development Seed — 2012-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

There are some new technology events kicking off this week with the AWS and Data Business groups both holding their first get together, along with some long running groups like the Online News Association holding meetups. Check out our roundup below to help you plan your social calendar this week.

Tuesday, October 23

6:30 - 8:30 pm

ONA DC Meetup: This month's meetup will feature presentations from folks at the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, a group of people working on data experiments and tools that they hope will change the way the media tells its stories.

6:30 - 8:30 pm

Data Business DC Meetup: In its first meetup, this group will look at how local startups are using food-based data in their business - from tracking customers food preferences and orders to what they're saying on social media. Come out if you're interested in hearing how people are using data to form their startup.

Thursday, October 25

6:00 - 8:00 pm

AWS Meetup: This inaugural meetup for AWS will include presentations from GeoEye on how they serve up geospatial satellite imagery, and from Amazon Web Services on Dynamo DB. If you want to learn more about AWS and meet others working with it, check this meetup out.

Updated Global Adaptation Index Launches

Development Seed — 2012-10-19T00:00:00-07:00

On Monday leaders in the environmental community, government, and private sector came together at Princeton University to unveil of the second edition of the Global Adaptation Index (GAIN). GAIN, which we helped launch last September, is a powerful navigational tool designed to guide policy and private sector capital to the places where it will have the greatest impact on adaptation to climate change. You can explore the GAIN browser at index.gain.org.

More indicators

This year GAIN's scientists strengthened vulnerability assessments by adding information about human habitats and risks to ecosystem services. Country pages now boast 12 new indicators in these sectors to assess vulnerability to climate change and ability to adapt to it.

New maps

We updated all maps with a more logical color scheme, such as this one showing Uganda's GAIN score.

A new four color map features the key quadrants of the GAIN index. Countries in the red quadrant, such as Uganda, are highly vulnerable to climate change and not ready to take on investments to react to it. Likewise blue signifies that a country is vulnerable but ready for investment, yellow shows low vulnerability and low readiness for investment, and green - as the ideal quadrant - shows low vulnerability paired with solid receptiveness for resilience building investments.

Updated rankings

Country rankings have been updated to properly reflect equal scores. For instance, Argentina and Lithuania share the same vulnerability rank of 32, with Israel immediately following them with the rank of 34.

Header refresh

GAIN also wanted to do a quick design refresh on their header to reflect some organizational and branding changes.

Behind the scenes

The data portal has been upgraded from node.js 0.4.6 to 0.8.9, and all maps are now generated with Mapnik 2.0 - bringing it up to the latest versions and capabilities. Everything else remains as launched last year. The site is built with Backbone.js and Bones, the data is stored in CouchDB, and we're serving from behind an Nginx proxy.

Mapping Reforestation in Lebanon

Development Seed — 2012-10-18T00:00:00-07:00

I'm in Beirut all week working with the Lebanon Reforestation Initiative mapping team on new ways to publish their environmental analysis to stakeholders, researchers, and partner NGOs. The reforestation work this team is doing is essential. Lebanon's forests have been reduced by 30% in just the past 30 years. This loss is equivalent to the loss over the past 2,000 years.

Maps are being used to change the trajectory and regrow forests across the country. Mapping coordinators use data to determine where to reforest and which species to plant, directly informing the scope and direction of the whole organization's work. Lebanon Reforestation Initiative is also engaging their on the ground partners and stakeholders to publish their own maps using open source tools. There is a lot of energy in the online map publishing space here as the team gears up to launch with their new website in the next few weeks.

Working with vegetation expert Joseph on the mapping site.

The mapping and data team has been amazing to work with. We're excited to be part of their work analyzing potential reforestation sites and measuring current sites. Here is a quick preview of some of the maps we have been working on together.

This map uses swipe to compare combinations of layers, seen here are forest cover and wildfire risk.

We'lll post more in a few weeks when the full mapping app launches!

Week in DC Tech: October 8

Development Seed — 2012-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

Interested in discussions around internet freedom or open source stacks? Or do you prefer to dive into code at hackathons or have your discussions over beers? Check out the technology events happening in town this week for your dose of startups, code, crisis mapping, and more.

Wednesday, October 10

5:30 pm

Science and Academic Freedom in the Digital Age: The American Association for the Advancement of Science is hosting this event on internet freedom to discuss what implications is has for the work of scientists and engineers. Come out for this discuss and for the reception to follow.

8:30 pm - 2:00 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session: Want to put some spark into your project idea? Come to this after hours session to work alongside others trying to launch a new project or business idea and get fired up.

Thursday, October 11

6:00 - 9:00 pm

Crisis Mapping ICT4Drinks: This happy hour kicks of the International Crisis Mapping conference in town this weekend. Come out for drinks with people working in crisis mapping, data management, and related fields. We'll be there talking about using MapBox for disaster response.

6:30 pm

OpenStackDC Meetup #5: This month's meetup will include presentations on Juju, Puppet, and one on multinode deployment with Quantum from our friends at BlackMesh. Come out to hear presentations and meet others building with open source tools.

This Weekend

10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Random Hacks of Kindness at ICCM: The Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon is teaming up with the International Crisis Mapping conference to work on tools to solve problems faced during humanitarian crises and disaster response. Specifically they're looking for mappers, humanitarians, and developers to turn out some interesting new tools and projects.