[Gfoss] [Nosi-discussion] Request for proposals: Open source redevelopment of EarthTrack.Net

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1

mi ricordava siti visti di recente e prodotti da frequentatori della nostra beneamata (lista)…

magari qualcuno si cimenta…(se lo fa, mi faccia sapere come va!).

riporto in cima solo 2 righe dal “bando”. scadenza 9 novembre.

…Software will be done as a work-for-hire to Earth Track. Earth Track will abide by the underlying license requirements of the CMS…

non so di più sulle organizzazioni che lo lanciano (http://www.earthtrack.net), quindi vi invito a fare verifiche autonome…

e buona serata

andrea, noto pibinko
http://pibinko.altervista.org

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Deborah Elizabeth Finn <deborah.elizabeth@finn.com>
Date: 22-ott-2007 17.47
Subject: [Nosi-discussion] Request for proposals: Open source redevelopment of EarthTrack.Net
To: Nonprofit Open Source Initiative <nosi-discussion@nosi.net >

Dear NOSI Colleagues,

We are writing to you on behalf of our client, EarthTrack.Net. Earth Track focuses on exposing, valuing, and publicizing government subsidies to the energy sector that harm the environment. These subsidies persist in large part due to a lack of timely, accessible, and understandable information on these damaging programs. Earth Track seeks to redevelop its web site to more effectively leverage and link the work on environmentally harmful government subsidies that is being done by groups around the world.

We would like invite members of the nonprofit open source community to submit a full proposal for the website, in response to the requirements and use cases outlined below.

The proposal must include the following:

  1. A summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the platform you propose to use for developing the EarthTrack.net web site, specifically as related to the requirements we’ve outlined.
  2. Specific details on the strategies you’ll employ to fulfill the requirements, and any caveats or potential snags that might arise given any platform weaknesses.
  3. Cost estimates itemized by requirement or deliverable.
  4. Timeline for completion.
  5. The development team, and a short statement of your organizational style/culture.
  6. Your organization’s intellectual property philosophy
  7. A short summary of your company and its history, with past projects that are similar to this one.
  8. Three References

Please contact Michelle Murrain via email or telephone with questions about the proposal. Please submit the proposal to us. The proposal is due by the end of the day on November 9th.

Many thanks and best regards,

Michelle Murrain
MetaCentric Technology Advising
michelle@metacentric.org
413-475-2632

Deborah Elizabeth Finn
Cyber-Yenta
deborah_elizabeth_finn@post.harvard.edu
617-504-8188

===========

Overarching Goals

The over-arching goals of the site are for it to be:

  1. The primary resource for people thinking about environmentally-harmful subsidies, and to leverage the activities of organizations working on these issues.
  2. Well-organized and usable for both browsers and content creators.
  3. Economically sustainable (primarily using ad revenue).
  4. Reliant on an underlying technology that is both flexible and extendable, as well as affordable for a socially-oriented organization.
  5. Facilitate contributions of data and content in structured areas from known (not anonymous) community members in a simple and intuitive manner.
  6. Allow anonymous contributions of documents and data that is subject to site manager review prior to becoming public.
  7. Relatively low maintenance.

Audiences

The audiences of the site are:

  1. Very highly placed policy makers - managerial level staff in state and federal governments and international agencies; academics and policy analysts actively working on energy policy.
  2. Professional journalists.
  3. Activist and NGO communities - wide range from decision-makers to street-level activists.
  4. Staff-level personnel in government agencies and affected business organizations.
  5. Graduate students - sometimes to support research, but mostly as content-contributors.

Technical Requirements

  1. Ability to create and manage a large amount of categorized text. There will be a great deal of content that needs to be categorized (by subject area, geographical area, issue, tag, etc.) on the site. This content should be accessible via links with specific keywords and/or tags as well as simple and advanced searches. We expect this requirement will be fulfilled out of the box by the CMS platform chosen.

  2. Granular user management and permissions system. Users should have access to create and manage content, depending on the permissions they have been given. This authorization system should include authorization by content areas that cuts across standard navigational categories and sections. Again, this should be included by the CMS out of the box. If it requires enhancements, please specify what you think would be needed, and what the cost estimate would be.

  3. Blog capability for one, or multiple users. Again, another out of the box feature.

  4. Management of folksonomy. All content should be able to be tagged, and interfaces exist to browse and search by tag. Additional categorization and management of tags might be helpful, but aren’t a requirement.

  5. Sophisticated document management: there should be a single point of entry for documents (single interface, easily accessible,) and documents can be displayed by author (either as a publication if internally authored, or a resource if not,) keyword, issue, tags, and geographic area. References and links to documents in the repository should be easily accessible for those adding content (in other words, from a usability standpoint, when someone is entering content into a page or node, an interface to select from available documents to link to should be available.) We understand that some CMS platforms do not have this rich a document management system, and that add-ons may be needed. Please outline your strategy for meeting this requirement, as it is a critical one.

  6. A facility for a structured database system (initially for a “Plant Tracker” to track plant-level subsidies) that has the following features:

    1. Some structured fields, including plant location, name, ownership, type, etc.

    2. Some unstructured fields for text information

    3. Fields are editable (unstructured text fields wiki-style)

    4. Detailed history on each change to any field: this would mean that the values of each field could be tracked over time, and the changes would be easy to see and search for. Revert, however, is not necessary.

    5. Ability to track changes in some fields over time (like ownership, environmental citations, etc.) (this might easily fit under “D” above.)

    6. Ability to have one user as a gatekeeper/manager of each “record”/“page” (each plant)

    7. Ability to have multiple gatekeepers of the dataset.

    8. Ability to retrieve mixed datasets (categorized text, document, and database records) from search or “browse by” methods. In other words, a search on a specific string should return all content and data that fits - in an interface that is easy to navigate.

    9. We will create new structured datasets from this model/system, so an interface to create new “tables” for different kinds of subsidy data is necessary.

  7. Granular and flexible ATOM/RSS syndication - by category, geography, tag, and search terms.

  8. Ability to draw data from other sources via APIs and RSS in a way that is easy to do, and can be incorporated in searches. We don’t have any specifics at the moment, but it might be interesting to think about things like grabbing geographical data from Google, and data from other sources that provide public policy data.

  9. Ad serving and ad revenue tracking capability. Ideally, the ability to share ad revenues with content managers (via granular tracking of ad performance) would be helpful as well.

Technical Specifications

We have decided that we want this platform written on top of one of the following CMS platforms: Plone, Drupal, or Joomla. We expect it to be hosted offsite. This need not be installed on a dedicated server, although it should be able to withstand high traffic without performance degradation.

We would like any customizations to be written as modularly as possible, to act as true modules/apps on top of the CMS platform, so that they are portable to other contexts.

Development Process

Much of the work which would comprise a “discovery” phase has been completed. However, a design phase, with detailed wireframe mockups and work flow design will obviously be necessary. There will be a technical project manager/liaison (Michelle Murrain) who will be overseeing the project; Deborah Elizabeth Finn will be acting as the project’s strategic advisor.

Intellectual Property

Software will be done as a work-for-hire to Earth Track. Earth Track will abide by the underlying license requirements of the CMS.

Possible Use Cases

These cases illustrate the variety of ways in which the Earth Track site aims to be used, providing additional guidance for the technical requirements of the site rebuild.

Policy maker’s aide

A senator from Ohio is working on the energy bill, and wants to know what ethanol subsidies presently exist in the state of Ohio, and in the surrounding states of Indiana and Michigan. She sends her aide to find this information out. The aide goes to EarthTrack, and puts “Ohio”,“Michigan”,“Indiana” and “Ethanol” into the search form. Out comes information about plants related to Ethanol in those three states, as well as articles written about ethanol subsidies that include information about those three states

Content Contributor

  1. A grad student from Tufts is working on the issues of how oil subsidies given to southern states discourage investment in alternative renewable fuels. He has amassed a large amount of information about refineries in Louisiana, which is his focus. He is given enough access that he can create new plant records, enter in the information he has on the plants, and also edit information about plants in southeastern Texas, which he has also learned a lot about in his work. He is made “plant manager” for 10 plants.

  2. An academic researcher has just published a report detailing the link between poor accounting for revenues in the oil and gas sector in an oil-rich nation with the high overall level of corruption in the country. As part of publicizing her analysis, she uploads the document into the Earth Track data resources section. It is queued for review by the content manager, accepted, and enters the repository of documents on subsidies available to users of the site.

Environmental Group

  1. Citizens Opposed to Coal Emissions, a Washington, DC-based NGO, is worried about an influx of investment incentives to finance new coal technologies. Plants are being proposed for all over the country. The NGO’s project manager is trying to figure out how to develop an information base on what is happening, and how to utilize its available resources of undergraduate students around the country to leverage its campaign. They decide to use the Earth Track plant tracker system to store and integrate information on the plants, enabling them to get a holistic picture of what is happening without having to invest any money in software infrastructure or staff training. As their campaign begins to get the attention of other groups, these new groups add to the information base in the Earth Track system, leveraging the capacity of each organization.

  2. Stop Loan Subsidies, another DC-based group, has been tracking a variety of national and international banks that provide loans and loan guarantees to extractive industries at subsidized rates. Their work has been intermittent due to funding gaps. They are hoping to develop a more consistent perspective of what is happening by working seamlessly with other organizations interested in the same topic. In addition, they hope to move beyond simple tracking of loan commitments to more advanced valuation of the associated credits risks and resultant subsidies. They enter into a content sharing arrangement with Earth Track and engage them to add a loan valuation module to their site that can be used on any credit subsidies entered on the site to estimate their subsidy profile.

Press

A chemical plant in California had a fire, and a reporter hears from one of his sources that the plant had received a loan guarantee from the federal government in 2005, supposedly to enhance plant safety. He goes to the EarthTrack site, searches for that particular plant by name, and finds information about the loan guarantee. His search also shows links to other resources about loan guarantees that have been given to many other chemical plants around the country.

Environmental Foundation

The BigBoss Foundation tracks exposure of lower-income communities to toxic emissions from industrial facilities, but has had limited leverage in influencing plant siting and operational decisions. The Foundation discovers that many of the polluting plants it follows have also received substantial public subsidies, not only during their construction period, but in subsequent years as well. They hope to use this data to pressure the government agencies providing the subsidies to require improvements in the plants’ pollution controls. To reach this goal, they decide to invest in improving the data on credit subsidies to the plants, data that will benefit all of their grant recipients in this policy area. The Foundation also enters into into a capacity-development agreement with Earth Track to expand the tracking of subsidies to these plants, and to implement data overlays linking plant emissions, subsidies, and political donations.

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