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Boulder Climate Spot by Open to Collaborate!

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Pitch

A free and easy-to-use local climate news and events plugin, designed for local orgs and news websites. Similar to embedding YouTube videos.


Description

Summary

We propose a development and distribution project of an informational plugin, that would be simple to embed in any website.  The purpose is to provide a fast, concise presentation of events and news happening across climate-related organizations and businesses in the Boulder-Denver metro area.  Distribution of the plugin would be easy and free, as the plugin could be developed in such a way to enable a website developer to copy and paste a snippet of HTML code into their website, similar to YouTube or Vimeo videos.  

Events and news could be set up to be automatically fed into the plugin with existing Google calendars, existing API's, or alternatively incentivize groups to manually submit events for free publicity.  Organizations and businesses could utilize the plugin to provide website visitors collective information about events and news in the area that may overlap in purpose and topic, such as multiple fracking events happening in one evening.  

Development of the plugin at any scale is possible, from an initial demo version with limited features, through a more fully-featured data access tool with filters, calendars, etc.  In any implementation, a concrete, deliverable result is quite feasible.  



What actions do you propose?

The actions needed for this project to succeed are an upfront software development effort to build the plugin.  Then, the distribution of the plugin requires local news sources, climate organizations, and businesses to embed the plugin in their websites.  Following that, no further direct action is needed. 

In the long run, this project aims to increase community action taken, through natural increased knowledge of local news and events.  Many events currently take place with fewer participants than may be potentially interested, simply because publicity for events is not always successful.  


Who will take these actions?

The primary direct actions required will be development of the plugin, and embedding this plugin in websites of local news sources, climate organizations, and businesses.  Anyone with access and knowledge to copy and paste the HTML snippet will be able to embed the plugin in their website.


What are the key challenges?

The key challenges are automatically aggregating the data from the myriad of climate organizations and businesses in the Boulder-Denver area.  Many have Google calendars and other calendar systems that may have technical interfaces to harvest real-time data from,  but many groups may not.  Some data collection may need to be manual, but if the plugin has enough public visibility, groups will be incentivized to submit event details for the purposes of publicity.


What are the key benefits?

The benefits of this project would be increased community awareness of local events and news surrounding climate change.  Individuals will find information from a scattered group of sources in one concise source, and hopefully learn of events they would not otherwise have.  Organizations and businesses may learn of other events or activities that may be duplicate, and therefore combine forces to build stronger events.

Additionally, as the plugin grows, we may be able to add to it's functionality to offer more and more learning resources and features.

If the plugin succeeds in boosting community awareness in Boulder longterm, the same software can be adapted to other communities in the future as well.


What are the proposal’s costs?

The primary costs for this project are for development efforts.  $2,500 would provide enough resources to build a fully-functioning first version of this plugin, including automatic Google calendar updates and local newspaper updates.


Time line

The development phase of this project would last approximated 3-4 months, and could live indefinitely.


Related proposals

Value not set.

References

Google Calendar API:

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/?hl=en

Boulder Daily Camera RSS Feed:

http://www.dailycamera.com/rss

RSS Feeds from the City of Boulder:

https://bouldercolorado.gov/newsroom/rss