CityGroups Weekend for Bay Area Urban Agriculture

October 8, 2011

Code Sprint & Public Design Workshop at Code for America Offices

85 2nd Street (at Mission), San Francisco

10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

October 9, 2011

Community Graphics Installations at and around Hayes Valley Farm

450 Laguna (at Fell), San Francisco

12 p.m. - 5 p.m.

We would like to invite you to a unique little software & design event in which we launch a public directory of urban agriculture community groups for the Bay Area.

Free. Please register on Eventbrite.

http://citygroupsbayarea.eventbrite.com

(See also groups.drupal.org page)

CityGroups

CityGroups is a platform for creating public directories of community groups. CityGroups was developed as a Code for America project, to help community mapping projects in Seattle. We are working now in several cities to find ways to pool resources together to make this a sustainable, adaptable & persistent solution to serve all city residents.

CityGroups is an open source project built with Drupal. It provides community groups data through an API, which allows the information to be used in multiple contexts.

On the web:

http://citygroups.org

http://seattle.citygroups.org

Design for Public Space

As part of this sprint, we will also work on designing neighborhood graphics for community groups, with the Hayes Valley Farm as our subject. The idea is to create graphics that can make local community groups more visible in our neighborhoods.

The Hayes Valley Farm is located at Fell & Laguna, and many people in the neighborhood see the farm and want to check out the farm, but never get around to it (though thousands of others volunteer at and talk about this farm internationally.)

What kinds of public design (especially signs and informational community boards) can we create encourage people to check out the farm, and what kinds of design elements would make the farm inviting to regular pedestrians? We hope to build understanding about similar principles that we can use to adapt for promoting Farmer’s Markets, Parks, Community Gardens, other civic spaces and opportunities. http://hayesvalleyfarm.com

Inspiration

http://candychang.com/

http://nonchalance.com

http://rebargroup.org/

http://iconathon.org

The Problem We Are Trying to Solve

Imagine a world in which a search for ‘urban agriculture’ would actually provide a balanced list of groups working for urban agriculture, community gardening, food groups and other small groups in the Bay Area - even if those communities were on different communication hubs - websites, blogs, Facebook, Meetups, or in real places in a neighborhood.

The way it is right now, everyone is spending hours searching the Internet and maintaining separate databases of the useful information they are finding. There is no public shared resource to make this easier to network groups. We are working to solve this problem by making this data more open, accessible & reusable.

What will we do?

On Saturday we will do work mostly indoors (talking, computing, drawing), and on Sunday we will work at & around the Hayes Valley Farm.

October 8, 2011

Saturday at Code for America Offices  10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Schedule

(schedule is subject to change)

1. Meet & Greet
2. Quick presentations about Community Signs, CityGroups & various Urban Agriculture communities in the Bay Area
3. Team Creation (facilitated group building activity)
4. Project time (see list of project ideas)
5. Presentations

Goal for Saturday

Move the issue of access to public information about Urban Agriculture groups in the Bay Area forward.

Who should come?

Urban Farmers, Developers, Drupallers, Neighborhood organizers, Community Gardeners, Urban Agriculturalists, Permaculturists, Designers, Sign-makers, Guerrilla Grafters, Map Nerds, Urban Planners

What to bring

1. Laptops if you have them
2. Sign & Stencil making supplies
3. Examples of interesting public informational graphics or inspirational public art
4. Lists of Urban Agriculture organizations & small community groups
5. Friends who might want to participate, have them also sign up on Eventbrite.

October 9, Sunday

Hayes Valley Farm

12 - 5 p.m.

Schedule

(schedule is subject to change)

1. Turning Compost
2. Tour of the Farm
3. Installing situational graphics in & around the neighborhood.
4. Photo documenting resources
5. User testing & Interviews

What to bring/wear

1. Sturdy shoes
2. Sunblock, water.
3. You’ll be outside. You might get a little dirty.

Check out the Hayes Valley Farm website for more information.

http://hayesvalleyfarm.com

Sign up / Register

The event is free:

1. citygroupsbayarea.eventbrite.com
2. groups.drupal.org (coming soon)

Things that can happen because we do this sprint

1. Promote a way to provide information about urban agriculture groups to many people who need up to date information.
2. Develop a data trade between urban agriculture & a community that wants urban agriculture.
3. Make better community graphics.
4. Build neighborhood resilience by helping people connect more easily.

Some Project Ideas

1. Design: Signs for the directory of groups
2. Design: Signs promoting kinds of groups
3. Geek: Focus on making a new module to theme the urban agriculture page
4. Strategy: Writing a statement about why the directory is useful & how it can be used
5. Geek: Email verification
6. Data: Add data to the site
7. Geek: Scrape old websites that have useful information