Earth.org - meet the team » blog post

Earth.org now connects to Facebook. Just one password, one username, one click.

teresa — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:34:21 +0000

Earth.org has released a new feature: Earth.org travellers can now log onto http://www.earth.org with their Facebook account. Joining our Earth.org community has never been so easy.

With one password, one username and one click. Facebook Connect matters. It is changing how we integrate our daily lives with Facebook and throughout the web. For millions of people, Facebook has become their single, most important online identity.

Earth.org now enables every user to take their Facebook identity with them. Earth.org travellers can now create their new account or log onto http://www.earth.org with absolute convenience – simply by connecting with their Facebook account.

And that is how it works.

You are new at Earth.org? There is no need to create a new account on Earth.org. Just click on “Login” and you will see the button “Facebook Connect”. Enter your email and password that you use for Facebook and you can start exploring Earth.org.
You already have an Earth.org account? Log in with your Facebook password and email and we will check your existing account. You can then log in with your Facebook account every time you visit http://www.earth.org.

Please note: When you log out of Earth.org using Facebook Connect, you will be logged out of Facebook as well. Your privacy settings that are provided on Facebook are retained on Earth.org.

Many thanks to our web application developer Emran Hasan from Bangladesh, who has realised Facebook Connect for Earth.org.

Inspiration, support and friendships – the Earth.org partners

teresa — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:40:33 +0000

The Earth.org partner page presents a collection of partners and like-minded friends of Earth.org. A small dedicated page to credit befriended responsible projects as well as those websites and organisations who help to make Earth.org a success!

This week I’d like to introduce ekoVenture to you, a social marketplace for experiential travel that lets you find and book more than 10,000 approved trips around the world or in your own backyard. It’s about discovering a more authentic travel experience. Kellie Brown from ekoventure: “We enthusiastically donate 10% of our profits to support local communities through initiatives such as providing clean drinking water, preserving our reefs and rainforests, and much more. We wholeheartedly believe in doing everything we can to change the world through experiential travel.“

At Earth.org we know: Experiential travel can enrich our lives, traveling responsibly gives something back to the places we visit. We say: Don’t just look at it, live with it! That’s why we like ekoVenture’s approach. We are always happy to find like-minded friends and websites, it’s a great chance to support each other. We are very open to discuss any partnerships. In case you know an interesting website or organisation which go along with Earth.org’s aims – tell us!

On built-to-program product development, avoiding meetings and keeping people up to date via skype :)

valentinyeo — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:08:00 +0000

So basically product development and usability and i think for the most part also tech does not do meetings anymore. Especially not recourring regular ones. At least i encourage everyone not to do them and try and lead by example.

Here are some reasons:

Very often i found myself discussing stuff in meetings that was not relevant to TODAYS version of Earth.org. It’s like Otto says: No more concepts. The time for concepts is gone. We are now working on what edo is RIGHT NOW. Baby steps all the time. We all know what edo has to become… no need to discuss it ALL the time.

Alfreda, Slobodan and me have reduced the planning to features that are IMMINENT. That means the time for planning almost completely overlaps the time for the programming. Or in other words we plan while we program. Corrections are made ON THE FLY.

I use the same paradigm for MEETINGS. That means whatever has to be discussed needs to be discussed RIGHT NOW and must be relevant to the situation of EDO today.

With a huge project like ours you will find that all planning into the future is very very unreliable and 99.99% never is on time (apart from when slobodan pushes it through at all costs . I’ve seen people try that for over 10 years now. Stick with what is today and right now and you’ll be a happier person.

This was the main problem with TRPs (oh which btw. i havent read a single one FOR LIKE MONTHS) they simply have nothing todo with what edo is today. Thomas and i were recently working on the toys concept. We reduced it from a multipage document to i think like 2 wire frames that are IMMEDIATLEY ready to implement. Thomas is happier b/c less concepting and programmers are happier because no bloated feature that is not thought through. And ultimatley user is happier -> simpler feature.

So anyway… why don’t we need to do scheduled regular meetings then: because if the meeting is about stuff that is important right now and needs to be discussed right now, WHAT could be more important???? Thats right: Nothing. SOOOOOOOOOOO lets get in touch on skype RIGHT NOW and discuss what is important RIGHT NOW!

Be realistic: EDO is all about BABYSTEPS. Don’t plan huuuge meetings with loads of parties reccourring every week. Planned agenda and all that. Talk to me… now. Lets clarify it now!
You work for EDO, i work for EDO, it must be important right???

Since i am doing it like that i find myself working only on important stuff!

The role of Skype in this aka. Skype the MAGICAL TIME BRIDGE
What to do when the person you wanna talk to is NOT online. Thats where Skype (and in the future WAVE) comes into the mix. Send me an offline message. I will get it ONCE WE ARE ONLINE AT THE SAME TIME.

So instead of scheduling a meeting with me on google calendar (which i mostly don’t use anymore) send me a offline or online message on skype and i get back to you once we are online the same time or via another offline message.

If you want a meeting with a lot of people (costs some money you know… hourly wage x people x hours spent) then send a message to a group of people via skype. SAME THING only with lots of people.

“I’ve joined Earth.org to become a citizen of the world beyond the boundaries of countries.”

teresa — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:11:36 +0000

Babu Mohanan is Earth.org Ambassador of Kerala in India. He talked with Rafael, who coordinates the worldwide network of Earth.org Ambassadors, about the Ambassadors mission.

Rafael: Babu, you are living in Thiruvanathapuram. Can you explain us the long name?

Babu: Long place names are very common in this part of world. In the Colonial days, the English might have found it difficult so they called the city Trivandrum. The Name “Thiruvanathapuram” can be split into three words “Thiru”, “Anantha” and “Puram” Puram means city. There are at least two opinions about the meaning of the word “Anatha”.Some say it was derived from the the famous temple in the city. Some say it has roots in Jainism. The first word “Thiru” is an honorific which modifies a noun like a persons name (or a place name in some cases). The usage is something similar to the English “Mr.” or the French “Monsieur”. Learn more here

Rafael: You have joined the Earth.org team as second Ambassador for Kerala State in India. You will cooperate with Mathai Fenn, also Ambassador of Kerala. What expectations do you bring with you?

Babu: I want to work on providing more knowledge about Kerala to the world. I want to tell the world about its unique cultural past. I also want to post many pictures about its attractive geography.

Rafael: You are working in the field of customer support. Perhaps you can share with us ideas how to improve the usability of the Earth.org website and how to improve the project?

Babu: We need to attract more people to our site and also collect feedback from them about its usability.

Rafael: Why did you join Earth.org? What was your motivation?

Babu: To become a citizen of the world beyond the boundaries of countries.

Rafael: What place we have to visit beeing in Kerala State?

Babu: I will say that this depends on the visitor. Many come here to see the greenery and the backwaters. Some come here to get Ayurvedic treatment. A lot of people are attracted to its culture and dance forms.

Rafael: And a last but not least question: What is your wish for Earth.org?

Babu: Earth.org should become a place where people meet and share their knowledge about places in the world.

Rafael: Thanks for joining Earth.org, Babu!

You would like to become Earth.org Ambassador for your city or region?
Join in!

And now feel free to contact rafael(at)earth(dot)org or via Skype (rafael.michalczuk)

From the Writers Corner: New names, new content and site feedback

imogen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:39:04 +0000

Hi EDO,

Thought you might like a round-up of what’s been happening here in Writer’s Corner….

1) First, a Who’s Who.

Content Coordinator: Me (Imogen). It’s my job to make sure that the content going live is high-quality. This is now a single role, rather than being split between Ute and me, so I am working with all our writers - except for the Ambassadors who work directly with Rafael.

Core Writers: Barry, Grant and Fereal

New faces: Aimee, Maura, Rod and (as of next month) Mena and Manuela.

This makes a team of eight, plus Ambassadors like Radha who is uploading GREAT content at a rapid rate!

2) What’s happening this week

Maura is taking on the big job of including more content for Moscow, while Aimee is getting started on the Czech Republic.

Rod is continuing with his mammoth efforts on all of the places he has visited, and Fereal is contributing more articles to Vancouver while Grant continues to battle with getting internet connected at his new apartment.

Barry is continuing to populate the Hong Kong location guide with content, and Rafael and I are sharing head-scratching sessions over the various spreadsheets, guides and potential screencasts that need to be combined in an easy-to-use Starter Book for EDO new-comers… It’s a work in progress!

3) What’s coming up

I am getting to know all of our writers… This is a group of talented and motivated people, and it is a pleasure to be working with all of you.

We’re all becoming familiar with the new site, as well as taking care of the little things like new usernames before the blog is migrated to WordPress.

As locations are finished, it will be time to start marking them off – and officially announcing them here! True, a location will never be ‘finished’ but it will be nice to see a few of them ready to be floated, and marketed.

Rafael and I will finish putting together Everything You Need to Know When You Join EDO. Actually, I’m dreaming about the ‘finish’ part, but it never hurts to be optimistic!

3) Some site feedback (@tech i guess?)

These are all thanks to Rod, who has been diligently writing for Tokyo, New York and Vancouver, as well as others I am sure! Please note that the new site looks great, and is a huge step forward. Criticisms are given in the spirit of improvement and congratulations

Under “Fast Facts” for each city, “inhabitants” is spelled incorrectly (typo)

The population figures in “Fast Facts” would be more readable if they had commas (example: 7,000,000 vs. 7000000). I realize that many Europeans don’t use commas in that way, but since it’s an English-language website, it’s probably wise to follow the conventions of English. French speakers will still get the idea.

Under population, it might be an idea to break out the figures for the city and the metropolitan area that surrounds it. I tried earlier, but the software wouldn’t let me. Paris, for example, has a population of something like 2 million, but the metro area is something like 11 million — big difference. It could look something like: Population: 2,000,000 (Metro: 11,000,000). “Metro” could show up in gray in editing mode, and not show up later if the editor chose not to put in a figure.

I’m not sure how helpful it is to get information on a country’s languages when you’re looking at a particular city within that country, for the simple reason that there are wide regional variations. For example, if you look at the entry for New York City, it tells you that Hawaiian is an official language of the state of Hawaii. True enough, and very important info if you’re planning to travel to Hawaii. But few people going to NYC would care. The problem, as I’m sure you’re aware, is that the overall country info is being rolled into the city info, which saves time from a programming POV, but isn’t helpful to travelers.

When searching for “Victoria, BC”, the search results provide a long list of Victorias, each of which is identical. There’s no way of knowing which link to click. A solution might be to provide at least the country or regional info, as well (I think it was like that before the upgrade, but I’m not sure).

Have a great rest-of-the-week, see you round the ‘office’

The New Site Design: Evolution of Usability on Earth.org

valentinyeo — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:40:59 +0000

This week Earth.org has just launched a new site design that is mainly focused on improving on usability issues that the old design had. The challenge with Earth.org is that it is such a massive site already. The amount of different templates in use is mind boggling.

Ultimately we want to make the site ultra usable. Which means that everyone – in every country and of every age (whether they have disabilities or not), will find the site easy to use and navigate. We still have quite a long way to go but this has been the first massive massive step!

However even though this design improvement is a big step forward a lot of work is still planned. So most of the features that i will show you in this blog post are still early versions of what they need to become.

Simplified Homepage

We went for a much simplified Homepage that now also gives a sense of activity on our website through the Recent Activity Stream. What you see there is latest contributions of our members in a continous stream. Eventually that stream will become real time. Also we have Highlights of the travel guide. These are currently selected maually. These too will become eventually automatically selected by certain criteria like visits, etc.

Earth.org home page: http://www.earth.org

Universal Contribution Process (UCP)

The vision here was to come up with a consistent way of adding content. So that no matter where on the site you decide to contribute to Earth.org you will be always presented with a consistent layout. We haven’t unfortunately fully succeeded in finishing the process to a degree where it is completely satisfactory to us. So what you see now is a version that still needs a lot of improvement in usability and also diversity of acceptable media types (i.e. maybe videos). The ucp also shows for the first time the dynamic search that shows you all existing places in the DB starting with the letters you just typed. Sweet

Example: http://www.earth.org/contribution/Bangalore/

Simplified Category Structure

The category structure of Earth.org is one of the main differences to normal wikis. However with it comes a great deal of complexity when trying to make the site ultra usable. We decided to drastically reduce the amount of hierarchies and subcategories. This allowed us to reduce the amount of categories one can initially see when entering the travel guide to 8 or less.

Example: http://www.earth.org/travel-guide/Bangalore

New Gallery Function

Obviously pictures are a big part of making the travel guide more interesting so we came up with a simpler and pop-up-free, way of displaying our pictures. Loading time was a big concern. We managed to minimize loading time by using java script to only change the actual image and the url when you brows through the images. That way browsing becomes ultra quick.

Example: http://www.earth.org/travel-guide/Bangalore/parks-green-zones-gardens-zoos/Lalbagh-Botanical-Garden/image-gallery

There are tons and tons of minor corrections and bug fixes. Alfreda has reworked almost every template. Also there are many more technical novelties. Slobodan and his team kept improving the site on all levels during the whole process. One of the biggest features was the introduction of Amazon S3 for storage of image which was mostly handled by Julian.

Massive thanks to Alfreda for masterminding the usability changes AND to
Slobodan who as always takes on impossible deadlines that threaten his harm and sanity. I guess thats how you get stuff done haha!

Bugs

If you find bugs please put them in a ticket. http://trac.earth.org/newticket

How to tegister for the blog and add a nice picture to your profile

rafaelmichalczuk — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:02:12 +0000

The Earth.org blog is so much more than a blog. It is the where we all talk to the other people in our ‘office,’ and it doesn’t need to be serious posts only. The only rule is that it needs to be POSITIVE! There is enough bad news in the world, so the blog is where we share our daily activities, offer constructive ideas and give eachother plenty of encouragement.

It is great to post every day on the blog – we all work together and it is good to know what the other teams are doing, as well as getting to know the names and faces.

Don’t be shy – all voices and faces are welcome here.

How to start blogging?

You can sign up to the blog here: http://blog.earth.org/ and clicking on the ‘Register Here’ link on the right-hand side of the page. This will take you to a WordPress signup page.

Choose your username and enter it in the top box (try to keep it simple, like your first name, so that other EDO team members will recognise you). In the second box, enter your email address and a link will be sent to you to activate your blog account. Once you have signed up, it is time to post your first EDO blog! Go to http://blog.earth.org and click ‘Sign in’ on the right of the page. Sign in to the WordPress page and you will be taken to a dashboard that looks like this….

You can either write a post from here, or do it the easy way… Click on ‘Visit Site’ (in the top left corner of the page, next to ‘Earth.Org – meet the team’) and you will be taken to the blog, with a big friendly space for you to post a note…..

Now you are part of the blog. Tag your posts, so that others can follow up your contributions.

Adjust your blog profile and upload a nice picture of you.

For the picture create an account at Gravatar and associate image to your email. After some time it will auto pop on the blog:

GRAVATAR – your picture for the blog

What is a Gravatar? It is a profile and picture that is stored in one place. A Gravatar is associated with all WordPress sites, which means that any time you post something on a WordPress site (like the EDO blog) your picture will automatically come up. That saves you having to create a new profile every time you join a WordPress site.

To create a Gravatar, go to http://en.gravatar.com/

When you click ‘Get Your Gravatar Today’ you will be asked for an email address. Type in your email and a link will be sent to you that you need to click to register with Gravatar.

Once you have clicked this link, you can click on ‘My Account’ on the top left of the page, and add the picture that you think best represents you.

In the news!

teresa — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:26:05 +0000

Hey! I am starting my EDO-week with some good news. Sophie, PR volunteer in the UK team, published an article about Earth.org in a local newspaper in Plymouth / UK.

Thanks! Great work!

Fresh support for the sales team: Welcome, Ed!

teresa — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:10 +0000

Hey team! Say HELLLOO to Ed Ockelton, who has just joined in! Ed will do sales for Write&Plant together with Dan and Matthew. We are happy to have fresh support in the team!

Here some words from Ed:

“I studied Psychology at Nottingham University, and after graduation in 1996 I worked for a few years in market research, had a brief stint at the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust and then worked for a large marketing organisation as an account manager.
In 2002, my wife and I set up a ski holiday business, White-Peak Holidays (www.white-peak.com), and we moved out to French Alps to give it a go. Now, nearly 8 years and two kids later, we love living in the mountains, and we love where we’ve got the business to.
I am now keen to become involved in a worthwhile and challenging project outside of the ski holiday world which is why I have started working with the Earth.org team. I also hope to find time to become an Ambassador for the French Alps.
Unsurprisingly, given where I live, I love all things mountain – skiing, ski touring, climbing, mountain biking and hiking. My ambition in life is to see as much of the world as I can, while I can.
I’m really looking forward to working with everyone and helping this great site grow.”

Eva, welcome to Earth.org!

teresa — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:44:17 +0000

Eva Müller is joining Earth.org! Together with Dan she will take care of the sales/ business developement.

Eva, we are happy to have you with us!

Hello to everyone!
I am Eva and from now on I am gonna support Earth.org. Together with Dan I will find local sponsors for our lovely project. Since a lot of you are already involved for a long time in Earth.org, I am sure you can support me with a lot of ideas and thoughts and answer all the questions, I have in the beginning. Thanx!

But before I can really start supporting you, Iam going on a great adventure: This saturday I am moving from Germany to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to live there for (hopefully) two years. So in the moment I am kind of busy saying goodbye to my friends and to my family and preparing the last things for South-America. But from next week on, I am 100 % available, 100 % working and 100 % Earth.org!!!

Before I decided to move to Buenos Aires, I lived for six years in Berlin (Hamburg and Toronto), where I studied “Strategic Planning and Marketing” at the University of the Arts. This summer I worked for an online startup (real estate). I was responsible for the sales. By the way, that’s also where I met Otto, who used to work in the same office as me. And this is how I came to Earth.org. And now I am here. And I am happy. And I hope you are too.

Greetings from Germany!
Eva