Archive for ‘Announcements’:
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10/28/2008
Melkjug has a slick new look
Melkjug.org recently got a nice facelift. Congrats to Luke, Josh, and the design team - great work.
Melkjug is TOPP's newsfeed reader and tuner. If you're like me, your current feed reader probably has thousands of unread articles. Melkjug uses your preferences ("I like articles written by Kelly Vaughan" or "I like articles that Tim liked") to sort through all your articles and find the ones you actually want to read.
You can set your preferences by 'tuning' the handy filters in the right-hand column:
Besides the new look, the new Melkjug has added features like OpenID login, 'starred' items, and the ability to follow your friend's jug.
As with all our software projects, Melkjug is open source. You can visit the Melkjug project website at melkjug.openplans.org.
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Congratulations, GothamSchools.org on the great site redesign!
Their celebratory post:
We’re GothamSchools, and we’re going live today with a new design. We hope this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, the kind where we challenge each other on the important things but have each other’s backs in the day-by-day effort to make schools better.
Here’s what you get from us: fair, accurate, and honest up-to-the-minute reporting from the front lines of teaching and learning in New York City. We won’t pull punches, but we won’t play gotcha, either. In fact, we already broke a story — the UFT’s probable stance against Mayor Bloomberg on term limits.
And here’s what we want from you: eyeballs, so many of them that when we wake up tomorrow morning the site has crashed and you’re left refreshing your browser in frustration. (Don’t worry, we have the bandwidth to support you.) We’d also like your insight: Leave us comments and send us tips with your scoops from the schools.
GothamSchools will be following developments in at least two arenas: what happens inside classrooms (any borough will do), and what happens inside Tweed Courthouse, the place that Chancellor Joel Klein calls “work,” along with all those other places we find ourselves when we’re on the trail of the Big Story: the UFT headquarters at 52 Broadway; the halls of state government in Albany; and in the heads of DOE officials, visionary educators, and involved parents.
To cement the distinction, from now on we’ll be organizing our daily dispatches into two distinct blogs. At the head of the Classroom is former teacher Kelly Vaughan, who after eight years of teaching in the Bronx knows a thing or two about schools. And anchoring the Newsroom are Philissa Cramer, formerly of Insideschools, and — here’s another new thing — Elizabeth Green, of the late, great New York Sun. You can read all of our posts in one place (just hit the “Home” tab at any time) or switch between the Classroom and Newsroom.
Here’s what else is new:
- We’ve crafted a snazzy new design to match the high quality of our reporting.
- We’ve created a place for longer and more comprehensive pieces than are typically included on a blog. Check these out in our Features section.
- We’ve added a calendar stocked with upcoming events, from professional development opportunities to parent meetings. Know of something happening? Submit an event.
GothamSchools is better today than it was yesterday, and tomorrow it will be better still. But we need your help. Let us know how you think the site can be improved. And above all, keep reading. We’ll be blogging.
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3/6/2008
Announcing OpenGeo
We recently unveiled OpenGeo.org, the online home for the OpenGeo team.
Back in 2001, OpenGeo was just a twinkle in our eye. When they started GeoServer, Mark Gorton, Chris Holmes, and their collaborators saw the huge potential for open source, collaborative technologies to help transportation-planning bodies make better decisions.
We realized early on that in order to do complicated transportation modeling right, first you need to know ‘where the roads are.’ This discrete technical problem shed light on a huge opportunity: every municipality in the world needs to manage and share location-based information, whether it’s with colleagues, parallel agencies, or private citizens. But the technology tools to meet this basic need were inadequate.
Sharing location-based information – whether road data, crime statistics, or water quality readings – was expensive and cumbersome, partly due to proprietary tools that relied on closed formats.
GeoServer is a simple concept: share maps and their underlying information. Make it easy to share location-based data via maps on the web, and more groups will share more data. How? Follow open standards, support a huge variety of formats, play well with other technologies, and you lower the barriers to sharing and using data.
GeoServer has really taken off, and along the way, bolstering a larger community of production for open geo-based technologies. TOPP has become a leader in the field, ontributing to related open source tools (including OpenLayers and GeoWebCache) and doing consulting work for clients like Google, Landgate, and Portland TriMet.
And now the team that builds GeoServer and related products has a new home. Take a look!
