MapBrief™

Of course you’re special.

I merely invite you to consider the possibility that it’s your project goals that may not be terribly…unique.

And that the smartest guy in the room is the room.

Because the room is smarter than both you and your developer,  it’s worth investigating whether someone has largely solved your problem already and made it (freely) available.  Of course there will be custom tweaking; it’s the wholesale wheel-reinvention many of us see every day that is objectionable and so often the product of tunnel-visioned project management and/or feckless developer-think.

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A long-time client was pondering whether to replace their 10-year old website that is a mountain of crufty legacy PHP code, partly to become smarter about serving up content to different user types and partly to liberate them from the burden of a custom-everything codebase that I’ve assured them no new developer really wants to dive into and figure what is going on.

Hence a CMS.  Having developer friends working to good effect with Drupal, we quickly determined it met the core needs of the client and was as plug-and-play as could be expected.  While the client certainly dug the ‘free’ aspect of Drupal being an open source, the clincher was the assurance that any time they could find ten Drupal developers in Denver off of Craigslist who could quickly troubleshoot problems, extend functionality, etc., without the delay and cost of wading through ten years of accumulated one-off code.  (With DrupalCon in Denver this week we can only hope a few more users/developers will have a look around and decide life next to the Rocky Mountains is sweet indeed).

            Harnessing code backed by a community bestows Walden-esque serenity

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Another interesting dimension of the community code story appeared this week in a post on the FCC blog.  Like a number of .gov sites, it too runs on Drupal, and includes a number of maps created with TileMill and served up by MapBox.  All to the good, but in creating a specialized module to integrate these maps into their Drupal site, they’ve contributed said module back into the Drupal community.  (The range of FCC mapping efforts utilizing geospatial open source software will be prominent at the upcoming FOSS4G-NA conference coming up in a couple of weeks in Washington DC.)

Set aside the particular use case for a moment.  As a taxpayer, having government entities efficiently use proven community-based technologies and contribute their own custom extensions back into the commons strikes me as very much in the spirit of the public good.

Whether the setting is public or private, the odds of pulling off a successful IT project have always been longer than either software vendors or consultants would ever cop to.  With the maturation of the online commons it would be foolish not to do your homework investigating whether there is not already a well-trod path laid down by others in the direction of your project’s goals.

—Brian Timoney