diff --git a/content/dev/carto-forms.rst b/content/dev/carto-forms.rst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c8222ce --- /dev/null +++ b/content/dev/carto-forms.rst @@ -0,0 +1,71 @@ +Carto-forms +########### + +:date: 30-03-2012 +:author: Alexis Métaireau, Mathieur Leplatre +:tags: GIS, forms + +The idea +======== + +This idea is walking in my head since some time and I've been talking with a +bunch of people about it in the last few months. to put it shortly: what if we +had a way to build forms, ala google forms, but with geographic informations in +them? + +If you don't know google forms, it means having an user-friendly way to build +forms, for the users. The form can then be used to submit data to a server, +which will do something with it. + +Google forms is missing two important things: first, it's not open-source, so +it's not possible to hack it, or even to run it on your server. Second, it +doesn't *really* know how to deal with geographic data. + +The use case +============ + +I can see many use cases for this. The first one is a collaborative map, with +facet filtering. Let's draw the user flow here: + +* An "administrator" goes to the website and create a form to list all the bear + hugging events in the world. He creates the following fields: + + * Name: a plain text field containing the name of the event. + * Category: the category of the event. Can be a finite list (only brown + bears, polar bears, female bears) + * Location: The location of the event. It could be provided by selecting a + point on a map or by typing an address. + * Date: the date of the event (a datepicker could do the trick) + +* Once finished, he gets an url (says http://forms.notmyidea.org/bearhugging) +* He can communicate the adress by the means he wants to his community and they + can go to the page and fill it. + +So, as youmay have notice, It would allow us to create interactive maps realy +easily, just a matter of some clicks for the users. and if we also think about +a nice Web API for this, we could do server-side validation and built even +phone applications easily. To push the cursor a bit further, if we can come +with a cool description format for the data, we could even build the forms +dynamically on different platforms, with a generic client. + +Well, right, this is me dreaming. + +Let's get it real +================= + +As you may have understood, this isn't a really complicated problem. I've +started an etherpad document and we've been chatting about that with `Mathieu`_ +some times. I think we can come with an elegant solution without too much +pain. Mathieu is used to work with GIS systems (which is really cool because +I'm not at all) and knows his subject, so that's an opportunity to learn ;-) + +We will be at `Djangocong`_ on april 14 and 15 and we will probably have +a brainstorming session and a sprint on this, so if you want to help us, or +just to discuss, feel free to join! + +We don't know yet if we will be using django for this or something else. We +have been thinking about couchdb, couchapps and geocouch but nothing is written +in stone yet. Comments and propositions are welcome! + +.. _Djangocong: http://rencontres.django-fr.org +.. _Mathieu: http://blog.mathieu-leplatre.info/