Carto forms draft.

content/dev/carto-forms.rst

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+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/