2. March 2013 April 2013 June 2013
Why Maps
An energy campaign story:
Groups, Allies & MPs
3. • 31,000 Wildflower Seed
packs
• 100+ Bee Worlds
• People Love Bees!
Why Maps
4.
5.
6. Map Maker Google Fusion Tables
Means non-technical person can…
• Add layers with simple thing like an icon, coloured boundaries
• Uses any published google fusion table
What does it do today
7. What we learned
1. The data is out there
2. Collaboration
3. Distributed open access and ownership
Map Maker Google Fusion Tables
8. Is this you?Development
community leaders
Open Source experts
Django,
Jquery,
Python
developers
UX
designers
Come to: http://www.meetup.com/London-Climate-Change-Coders/
Email: sionelis.williams@foe.co.uk / oliver.passey@foe.co.uk
Notes de l'éditeur
Friends of the Earth, work with our network of around 200 local groups across the country and sister groups internationally to run campaigns that tackle climate change and other environmental issues.
Helped 50 groups to actively lobby their MP to support a clean power target, showed green businesses, community projects and other green groups in their area.
Great Tool as a campaigner helping to co-ordinate things and share information.
As the campaign progressed:
Day 1…Mar-2013: Constituencies, Local Groups, Community Energy, Green Businesses, Other Green Groups, Renewable Energy Projects
“As a local campaigner, who’s in my area, who can I join up with.”
Day 2…Apr-2013: + Constituencies turned green for supportive MPs.
“I can see here how many people emailed my MP about this issue.”
Day 3…Jun-2013: + Constituencies, which way did they vote Green=Yes, Grey=No, Yellow=Neither.
“As a campaigner at Friends of the Earth or any other organisation. I can see at a glance how wide was the support”
www.foe.co.uk/cbemap
Helped our campaign supporters
To see the progress
Easier for people to join-up to lobby MPs
Target what they were doing in their local areas
Internal planning of tactics
Over the last year, we’ve used it on our Bees campaign to beautifully show the campaign spread over the country
What: Sent out for planning 31,000 wildflower seed packs, helped support communities and organisations create over 100 Bee World. People got to share their messages and photos about seeds they planted. Painting a wonderful story of Bee Cause supporters in your area and others.
Why: Show people how their small pack of seeds is part of that greater campaign in their area and elsewhere.
Since then the mapping tool has helped us explore and communicate a whole range of environmental issues.
The most recent application is a flood map showing how many homes are at risk in each Parliamentary constituency in England and Wales. It also provides users with information about their MP, including a link to their twitter profile where available and has recently been updated with data on flood defences.
This map helps:
illustrate the existence of local climate change risks and impacts
indicates our current level of preparedness
informs the scale of action and urgency of response required
connects constituents to their elected representatives
It’s worth mentioning that Friends of the Earth’s work on flooding, and adaptation more generally, is part of a broader package of climate change campaigns that invite people to engage with climate change in a way that resonates with them. Encompassing fracking and community energy, these not only identify challenges but provide solutions. Our view on adaptation is that it makes the case for mitigation more convincing than ever. So yes, we do need to adapt to climate change impacts like flooding, and my colleague Guy Shrubsole has been very busy exposing the Government’s complacency in this regard.
But unless we tackle the underlying causes (by leaving unburnable carbon in the ground and switching to renewables) the costs of that adaptation will continue to increase exponentially. Rather than carry on with business as usual and accept spiralling adaptation costs into the future we need to do everything we can to invest in mitigating climate change now and insulate ourselves in every sense of the word. We hope some of these maps, and maps that our activists and others might want to make in future, can have a role in helping society engage with climate change and environmental issues more generally.
Friends of the Earth Mapping Tool Version 1 - July 2013
We are using Python (Django) for the back and Javascript (jQuery and Google Maps API) for the front end.
Version control on Git.
Things we adapted from other people
Constituencies Boundaries: England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland (from Guardian Data)
Renewable Energy Projects (DECC)
MP office information
Things we already had – uploaded and converted
Local Groups Data
Sharepoint Allies List
Businesses List
Community Energy Projects
Things we created
Case Studies
The power of the tool is that we can now use these map layers again.
· Development community leader – triaging bug fixes, evangelising with developers and co-ordinating development
· open source expert – who can advise on the pros and cons of different license models.
· developer – developing new feature in Django or improving the interface with jQuery
· User experience designer – someone who can run studies with users to establish how the UI could be improved
Urgent stuff to do:
Open sourcing it
building a developer community around it
making improvements to the user interface
adding new features – more sophisticated user control and user generated content workflows