Mapping Innovation at the World Bank with Open Atrium
Using map and faceted search features to improve collaboration
Open Atrium is being used as a base platform for collaboration at the World Bank because of its feature flexibility. Last week the World Bank launched a new Open Atrium site called "Innovate," which is being used to support an organization-wide initiative to better share information about successful projects and approaches to solving problems.
The core of the site is built around helping World Bank staff discover relevant "innovations" happening around the world and providing a space to discuss them with colleagues in topical discussion groups. To facilitate this workflow we built a custom map-based browser feature that combines custom maps with faceted search, letting users quickly find interesting content. The screenshots below from a staging site with a partial database show what this feature looks like.
As users apply new facets to their searches, the map results update to reveal global coverage for innovations that meet the search criteria.
Once users have found an innovation they want to discuss, they can see if any related discussions exist or choose to start a new conversation in any group, right from the innovation's page. This simple workflow for finding innovations and starting new conversations is essential for helping the potentially thousands of users who may join the site engage with each other to discuss new ideas.
Leveraging our recent work with the World Bank on their "Communicate" intranet, we were able to quickly set up a similar new site, complete with Siteminder integration that seamlessly creates new user accounts and allows single sign-on for World Bank staff. This past investment let the World Bank get into specific customizations for the map feature quickly, building with Drupal's faceted search module and clean, simple custom maps generated by our alpha version MapBox AMI. In the end, the benefits of open source tools let us launch another new custom Open Atrium site for the World Bank in a fraction of the time required for the last site and for a completely different internal audience.
"Social" GIS?
Could this innovation mapping be considered as a “social” GIS (geographical information system), in the sense that it appears to enable interactivity, probably more easily (?) than other GIS programmes?
Brilliant
Ian Thanks for sharing. So many geographically dispersed organizations can learn from this. Also, this use of open source proves that if there’s a will, there’s a budget :) Sincere kudos. Tremendous work.
Cheers, Sameer
MapBox and Open Layers?
This looks very cool! Are you using custom tiles just to keep the map simple? I’m also curious if MapBox is going to integrate with Open Layers. It seems like the combination of being able to easily generate your own base map with the ability to leverage polygon-based shapes and searches would be a killer combination.
Cheers! Chris
Hi Chris, Glad you like it.
Hi Chris,
Glad you like it. To your questions, yes – we’re using custom tiles because the publicly available tile sets out there (OSM, Google, etc) don’t meet the specific design and communications needs of our clients. In this case they’re really simple, but MapBox lets us quickly make custom tiles to match specific visualization needs in, whatever those might be. Sometimes they’re more complex than OSM, Google, etc. too. Will White blogged about the tile generation process here: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/jul/01/generating-custom-map-tiles-...
And again, yes – we’re using the Drupal Open Layers module on this site. MapBox is hosting the custom tile sets that the Open Layers JS library pulls in. We’re excited about the opportunities here and will be sharing more about MapBox soon.
Cheers,
Ian