Sarah M Worthy shares the status of development of Spacepoints at the 2012 SpaceUp Houston Unconference. Spacepoints is an online social sharing platform designed to grow a community and build awareness of space-related activities while providing a revenue stream to support space-related causes.
1. http://spacepts.com
How it works for Users
How We’ll Build it on Tendenci
How You Can Help Us Expand
2. The Story of Spacepoints
Dennis Bonilla –
came up with the
Idea!
Cindy organized a The Requirements and Rules
SpaceUp were Created and Development
Houston Began.
Spacepoints
Conference.
And the Idea took off – all
the way to SXSW where it
will beta launch!
9. Spacepoints Activities:
• I Did - Plan an event, Volunteer, Shared ISS pass,
Took people along
• I Shared – Give a Point for sharing to User’s Social
Network (ie Twitter/Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn
• I Gave - Money, Space Souvenirs
• I Wrote - Tweetup Blog/pictures, Conference
presentation, Wrote to congressman, A song
• I Went - launch, tweetup, conference, Yuri's Night
• I Made - Hardware, Software
17. The Launchpad
• This is the main
Spacepoints stream
• All of the 6 actions are
pulled into one view, with
newest comments on top
• Ability for registered users
to “launch” / rank
favorites
• Ability for registered users
to share any of them on
other social
platforms/integrated
communities
19. How We Track Points
• User selects an Action from a list of 6
• User adds a description in a text field, and can attach links
(how many chars allowed?)
• Submitting Action shares with Launchpad community,
connected social sites, and awards a Spacepoint
• “Launch” and “Go!”
24. Earning Spacepoints - Ideas
• User posts an activity in one of the above categories
and earns a point
• Earn a point for each person that gives that activity a
thumbs up (come up with space name for "liking")
• Earn a point for logging in each day (to encourage
people to see what others are doing for outreach and
to vote on the activities taking place)
• Each category will award a point to the activity with
the most thumbs up for the day
• For every 25 votes a user makes they then earn 1 point
25. Additional Capabilities?
• Besides thumbs up button, have a "launch it" button to move an activity to
the top of the category list (does not award points, but is equivalent of
Twitter retweet providing higher visibility)
• Have a friends list in the system so you can easily vote for what your
friends did
• Show highest ranking users
• Highlight big winners of day (most thumbs up) and (most launch it) by
categories
• Have each posting open for voting for 3-7 days (at first until users in
database grow then close voting after 24 hrs)
• Provide 3 ways to view – everyone, friends, people who have voted for me
• Provide links to share post on twitter and/facebook
• Make sure database is open to anyone who wants to create their own
apps.
26. Launch and Go!
• Launch –
– From the Launchpad platform, users can select to “launch”
other users’ posted actions to promote them and top
“launched” posts are displayed on the homepage/main
column for everyone to see
– Can have a Launch button that embeds on websites and
when clicked, will give the content a chance to be
promoted on the Launchpad also.
• Go!
– Button that can be embedded on websites and
Spacepoints users will earn a “point” by clicking the Go!
Button and this will share the content with their followers
on Launchpad
27. Apply Online For Exclusive Access!
http://spacepointsbeta.tendenciapp.com
29. Questions? Want to Help?
Sarah M. Worthy
@sarahmworthy
spacepoints@spaceuphouston.org
Hinweis der Redaktion
All of the Spacepoints Graphics/Logos you see in this presentation and in our online and offline marketing material were designed by Susan Freeman (@godspeeddiscvry) who donated her time and expertise to create logos, banners, and favicons (among everything) to give Spacepoints collateral for Branding. This presentation is for the 2012 SpaceUp Houston Unconference February 25th and 26th to prepare Spacepoints for the Official Beta Launch at SXSW Interactive in March, 2012.Presented by Sarah M Worthy, Lead Spacepoints Developer
Mission/Vision Spacepoints is a mechanism to promote space exploration through outreach and engagement beyond the space community (those who are already interested in space). Spacepoints was created at SpaceUp Houston in February 2011 by Dennis Bonilla (@harbingeralpha) and is a crowdsourced effort to change the world through outreach and engagement of space exploration. Cindy Mahler, (@txflygirl) organized a SpaceUp Houston's "Spacepoints" Workshop on June 25, 2011 where participants defined the basic requirements for how users can acquire spacepoints. These requirements are being used to develop an initial back-end system, website, and app for people to start using. Development of the actual platform has been rocky. Sarah M Worthy (@sarahmworthy) volunteered initially to be the Project Manager, (programmers Wrangler). She also was in charge of promoting Spacepoints, and led the SXSW panel submission process which provides Spacepoints with a great audience to announce the beta launch. Initial platform development was led by Todd Palino, (@bonkoif) and was in PHP. Unfortunately, Todd’s schedule prohibited him from working on the platform so it would be ready for beta.The project stalled, and Cindy and Sarah brainstormed and experimented with different platforms and ideas – finally selecting Tendenci for the initial Spacepoints application to launch from.Want to learn more? Check out the Spacepoints Wiki: http://spaceuphouston.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Spacepoints.21
http://tendenci.com/Tendenci is a content management system developed on the Django framework and written in Python.Tendenci is intended primarily for Non-Profit Organizations and Professional Associations who need a revenue-generating website platform that is easy to use. An open source version of Tendenci is being planned for Spring 2012 and that made the decision to use Tendenci easier for SpaceUp Houston.
Taking the idea and requirements documentation to develop Spacepoints has been a fun challenge.We struggled to find a way to create Spacepoints with a volunteer-only (unpaid) team and tried different paths to development before finding a way to implement Spacepoints.We tried: PHP/custom coding, Drupal, Elgg, PHPBB, VanillaForums… The platform needed:Users and a way to register, login, and create different permission levels so regular users could add content, non-registered users could view but not change content, and we could invite moderators, designers, and developers to help expand the initial platform and integrate their applications with it to earn and share SpacepointsWe also needed a way to create and share space-related content so users could add their space activities and earn spacepointsWe need mobile capabilities* (this is still in process although you’ll see we have a plan)Ability to develop API’s and integrate other API’s was neededA way to promote sponsors and advertisers so that it could potentially also generate revenue for the SpaceUp organizationA way to track ‘points’ based on user-activity … so much more! (see wiki)And we needed a way to develop this without a lot of custom programming and wasn’t hard to use in order for us to get to a Beta-Capable state.
Let’s check out where the platform is at today – then we can talk about what we want by SXSW beta launch and the goals for the future beyond…
4 levels of User Permissions: anonymous, registered site user, developer-user to expand the platform, super-siteuser (spaceup founders/organizers only)The Tendenci platform allows us to create tiered levels of users with different, custom permissions/access to add, edit, change, and view content. We are still setting up the different levels and this will be ready before the SXSW beta launch.Login:determine user permission levels for general usersLayout of the user profile homepage?Create New Account:Require email confirmationWhat fields of information do we want to collectIntegrate facebook and twitter sign-in? Google?What else?
Spacepoints Homepage (under development)Still adding contentDeterming theme colorsGet Spacepoints will integrate with email newsletter subscription and user groupsEasy to Edit and Update Navigation – What do we want on the main nav and what order?Sponsors and Advertisers can be promoted on the homepage and on internal pages easily
User Profiles includes some of the features like:Contributions the User has made to the site Avatar/Photo and Profile page with contact informationGroups/Memberships can be added Still need to do before Beta Launch: update user permissions and groups, change accessBefore Spaceup Houston Unconference pre-launch – consider changing settings to private unless a member/userAdd membership types? (not sure – I would like to have this for Spaceup Houston memberships)Would like to integrate social networking details on user profiles for users to follow each other on other sites. That isn’t currently an option, however: That's a django plugin that is installed called Django Social Auth - https://github.com/omab/django-social-auth It's installed but hidden to admins on all of our sites. The social plugins all require apps to be written for their respective platforms, as well as API keys created.
Tag each category for displaying and creating custom views and searches? ( still working out the taxonomy of the site)Users can post in these, then view all/segment? How do we want to lay this out?Spacepoint Activity Tags: IDID, ISAID, IGAVE, IWROTE, IWENT, IMADE
Not certain which content module in Tendenci to use for I Did Activities: (unfortunately, Testimonials, Case Studies and other plugin apps currently only have admin-side views. It would take ~1-2 hours/plugin for our programmers to create the add/edit views on the user side/front end)Stories,TestimonialsCase Studies – was going to use this content type, may end up having to change it
Originally, we were going to have an “I Said” Activity, this is changing to I Shared at this time.The goal is to reward a Spacepoint for sharing something across a user’s social network.https://www.addthis.com should allow us to integrate a simple html/javascript widget for users to share content externally. I have installed the AddThis widget on several of the different Spacepoint Activity content types on the beta site and haven’t tested them yet.
Testimonial of what they Gave is probably best content type – can’t use yet, only admins have site I can create a custom form and perhaps develop a view from the form responses? (That might be a good idea for multiple things)
Articles can be used for things people wrote.They can add the entire writing or portion of it with a link and source, release date, and other details.
Locations module allows users to add an address with Google maps integration showing where they went.Later we can customize this further (requires coding/programming) to show a map with all the locations people have gone, updated as new ones are added if we want.
Photo Galleries and Video Galleries would allow users to upload a photo or video of what they made to earn spacepoints.Users have permissions customized so they can add photos to an album, but cannot edit or delete other photos or albums, or create new albums.
This is an extra Activity from the brainstorming – initially we thought it would be harder to implement but the Tendenci platform includes these Help Files as a content type and so I have implemented it.Help Files module can allow people to “request something they need” Later on – someone can “give” a spacepoint to someone who helps answer their question. (as one idea)
What we need? How does this Look in Tendenci? Currently I have just linked the different Activities/Content Types on a Single Page: http://spacepointsbeta.tendenciapp.com/get-spacepoints/This will require some backend work to create custom views – not sure how far this will be developed before SXSW beta launch. Anyone know python/django and/or CSS/HTML and want to help?Microblog for users to submit actions? (maybe just custom content?)Profile logins for each user with customizable permissions to allow them to post content in microblog/forums Ability for all users to share actions with their other / external social networksAbility for users to share external content on their internal spacepointslaunchpadAbility to rank favorite topics and display them automatically in “orbit”
Bonus Events Calendar – how do we use it?Add a “submit your space event” form to it*Promote SpaceUp and Space-related events so users can find ways to earn Spacepoints.Aligns with our goal of outreach, and down the road we can use it for online registration and a way to attract new users potentially.
Tendenci currently does track when a user adds, edits, or deletes content and there is an “event summary” total number for each user.We even have a report for most active usersWe would need to do custom programming to create views that only showed the “added content” for users in a report and then we would have point-tracking. (more complicated than just that, but totally a good start)
This is what I’d like the mobile template to look like.Need to think about inside pages for mobile also*
Currently, the plugins add/edit functionality is only available for Admins – creating front-end add/edit forms requires about 1-2 hours/form (I think each plugin has 2 forms, maybe 3) of a programmers time to create.
When a user logs in, they are taken to the Tendenci Dashboard. Can we change that? What do we want there? I would like a user to either go to their user profile home or the dashboard be different
How are we going to track, add up, and display points, rankings, and totals? How are we going to add points from external integrated sites? Tendenci tracks everything users do, and we will need to create custom “views” and searches to display this before we can reward spacepoints. I imagine this will be a post-SXSW beta project.
These items are definitely after the beta launch things to try and figure out*
(suggestions) Go! Gives the clicker a point and Launch gives the poster a point. http://agon-ratings.readthedocs.org - python ratings apphttp://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-simple-ratings https://github.com/dcramer/django-ratings
You’ll need to talk to Sarah M Worthy after the presentation at SpaceUp Houston’s unconference to get the secret SpaceUp Houston UnconferenceCodewordThen you can apply online at: http://spacepointsbeta.tendenciapp.com.Be sure to click on the “Apply for Beta Invite and you’ll be taken to a page where you can fill out and submit an application to receive your invitation.
Spacepoints would literally not exist without the support of these organizations and their volunteers and staff. Interested in sponsoring Spacepoints? We would LOVE your support! Please contact us at spacepoints@spaceuphouston.org for information.We are looking for sponsorship for both inkind design/development work on the platform as well as money and help promoting the platform.We will be building in advertising opportunities on the mobile and desktop views and offer companies opportunities to advertise to Spacepoints’ Members and enable them to receive discounts when they purchase from your business in exchange for spending their Spacepoints.