JewishBoston.com

More detail than you ever wanted about Phase 1 of JewishBoston.com

With today's kickoff meeting with Cantina, our software development partner, we are "formally" ending the 1st phase of JewishBoston.com. 

During the discovery process, we put all of our notes into a wiki, which we shared with our volunteer committee.  If you've been reading the documents posted here, you've already seen the output of that wiki, which is now available for your reading as our Phase 1 Report.

We learned a lot about using a wiki:

• If you throw a lot of information into a wiki, don't expect order to emerge from chaos.  It's still chaos.
• It's very helpful to figure out the order and the hierarchy before you put the information in.  See above re chaos.
• Embedding the order and hierarchy require that you manually put the links in to provide navigation.  This seems obvious, but it's not always clear how to do this.
• Most people are uncomfortable with the concept of group editing.  Training and guidelines are required if this is important to you.

But all in all, it was a good experience.  Very helpful to have a place to put everything and share it.  The wiki we used was free, also very nice!

One last note:  the name Phase 1 Report is a little misleading.  It's a very rough draft. We just wanted to show our work.  It reminds me a little bit of my 7th grade math teacher who didn't like it when you just turned in the answer to the problem, instead of showing all the steps to the solution.

Again, you can find the report at http://jewishboston.pbworks.com/.

CJP partners with Cantina Systems to build JewishBoston.com

We’re delighted to announce that our extensive search for a development partner is over and that we have selected Cantina Consulting to help us build JewishBoston.com. 

During our selection process, we had conversations with 11 different firms, got proposals from 8 companies, interviewed 6 of the respondents, and then brought 2 of them back for deeper conversations.  Cantina was the clear winner for a number of reasons.

First, the overall package of talent and size really worked.  Cantina is a small, talented, and nimble web developer in Boston. The team cut their teeth at larger firms and decided to build a practice together.  We especially liked that the people we met during our interviews are the people who will be working on the site. 

Second, all the firms that interviewed are interested in social media sites, but Cantina had much more experience than anyone else.  Since social media is an emerging and rapidly evolving field, this was very important to us.  From the first meeting that we had, Cantina was clear about our goals and insightful about the path to achieve them.

And finally, it just felt right.  The fit with the team was excellent.  After all the formal evaluation is done, what matters most is the sense of teamwork and shared culture.

So, hooray!  It’s very exciting.  Our kickoff is tomorrow, August 31st.  We'll be spending September finalizing the functionality for the first release.  More soon on timeline.

Learning from Bing

One of the things that a great site really needs to have is a great search tool. So we've been spending time looking at different search techniques and playing with Microsoft's new search engine Bing.

Bing is a new product powered by Microsoft, it is a search product that is being branded by Microsoft as a "decision engine" as opposed to a search engine. Although I have always used Google for my searching, Bing has some great features that I would love to apply to JewishBoston.com. 

For example...

Search history is a function that I'd love to have. What have I already searched for? This adds a personalization touch that I appreciate.

Bing also outperforms Google when doing a local search.  With each local listing, such as a kosher restaurant, you instantly see a review, photos, a map, directions with real time traffic information, the menu and more from your one search. That's a lot of information from a search!

My other favorite Bing function is the additional information you get when you hover over the right hand side of the search results. Information is displayed such as teaser text plus what else you can find on that given page. 

Imagine if you came to JewishBoston.com and searched for 'families'. Once the search results came up, you could then hover over the results for snippits of more information that could also point you to related events, programs or organizations. Or choose an event and get more information about directions, nearby restaurants and transportation. Wouldn't that make your search more helpful? More in-depth? More useful?

I know that those features make it easier for me to find exactly what I am looking for and that seemingly simple task is sometimes frustrating on community websites.

How do you want to search? What are your favorite search add-ons that make you less frustrated about finding what you need?

Organizational list

As we have spoken about, there are a lot of wonderful organizations here in the greater Boston are. I have been working hard to create as complete a list as possible.

Here is that List

And here is the mapping of this list

If you are, or know of, an organization that is missing, please send an email and we'll be happy to take a look!

How do you categorize Jewish life?

The latest trend in search technology is called "faceted search".  Endeca is probably the leading commercial provider of the web search experience that lets you look quickly through different categories of products.  Home Depot, for example, uses Endeca to help you buy a new Energy Star refrigerator. (Something I recently spent a lot of time on.) We're looking at Apache Solr, an open source solution.

Technical details aside, the real question is "how do we categorize Jewish life in Greater Boston?"  Here's a first take...

• Arts and Culture
• Community Events
• Interfaith programming
• Israel
• Lectures
• Courses and Education
• Holiday Events
• Religious Services
• People with Disabilities
• Social Services
• Volunteering

What do you think?  What's missing? Once complete, we'll use this list plus tags for demographics, geography (see Liz's map), and Jewish movement to help you dive into JewishBoston events and content quickly.

Playing with maps

In preparation for rolling out JewishBoston.com, I’ve been compiling information about the resources in our community - the agencies, synagogues, organizations, schools and even kosher bakeries. This is the start of the master list of Jewish Organizations in the Boston metropolitan area that the site will include. As Patty mentioned last week, there are about 500 organization. 504 according to my list to be exact (good guess Patty)!

Once JewishBoston.com is up, it will have built in maps and the ability to search by geography and distance.  But just for fun, I wanted to see what I could build now and create a google map mashup of these organizations. Luckily, there are tools out there to help create custom maps, especially for someone like me who has a love for technology and is web savvy, but is certainly not a programmer.

So here’s what I found.

The easiest way to create a simple map would be to do it in MyMaps in the Google system. This process would require data entry. They have an import option, but the files they ask for are quite a bit more obscure than your standard excel spreadsheet. Definitely not as easy as it should be.

As I searched for easier options, I realized that the first step was to Geocode the organizational spreadsheet. After some failed attempts, I found the BatchGeocode site.  Definitely the right tool. It’s impressively fast and accurate.   Now my spreadsheet had longitudes and latitudes for each location.

This done, I went to MapBuilder and imported the information. (Note: Mapbuilder says it can Geocode for you in the import, but I couldn’t get it to work.) Once I had latitude and longitude coded into my spreadsheet, it literally took minutes to create a map.

Once the map is built, it is really easy to add photos and descriptive information about every location. I haven’t had the opportunity to do this, but what a great tool this could be for any organization who wants to map out their community.

It was fun testing out these tools. With the right information, you don’t have to be a programmer to create and build your own maps.

I'd love to hear some recommendations from you about other helpful mapping tools – or if this information was useful to you.

Click the MyMaps button below to take a look at my map.