Click That Park

[jpvelez]

Hi all,

What would it take to adapt Click That Hood to parks? A certain park district in a large American city that I might happen to live in might be interested in doing that.

How cool would it be as a little game brought to you by your Parks district? Good way of creating awareness.

Basically this would involve making CTH work with a park shapefile and slightly tweaking the branding. Thoughts?

[pcal]

I think it's a great idea.

Here's some polygons:

shp: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Parks-Recreation/Parks-Shapefiles/5msb-wbxn

kml: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Parks-Recreation/Parks-KML/hmfy-xsta

[mwichary]

@jpvelez, I’m definitely open! Feel free to fire me an email at mwichary@codeforamerica.org with some details—the branding and any other differences you foresee.

[jpvelez]

@mwichary if it's alright with you, I would rather do this out in the open, where all may benefit from the discussion.

@pcal works for the Chicago Parks District. :) Please chime in with ideas!

Motivation

In generally, local park districts have a hard time spreading awareness about their parks and their facilities - swimming pools, running tracks, and so on. Most people simply don't know about what parks are out there.

It strikes me that ClickThatPark would be a fun way to spread awareness, and easy win for park districts throughout the country - they'd just upload a KML, throw in their logo, and blast out to twitters. (Facilities are pretty small, so I'm not sure this is the right platform.) Chicago could be the first.

Branding

Click that hood logo

Might be good to adapt the Click That Hood logo for parks.

• Text: "Click that park" or something more clever. If we wanted to get city specific, a pun on urbs in horto - Chicago's official city slogan - would be grand.
• Graphic: perhaps the text should be green or verdant or park-sy? Don't mean to overspecify, just tossing out ideas.

Park district logo

It would be pretty amazing if Parks districts could put their stamp on this. Each district's logo could be optionally uploaded and placed somewhere tasteful.

Related idea: co-branding between districts and CfA, like on the footer of Chicago's service tracker app. Arms-length, scalable way for Parks orgs to collaborate with CfA.

Design issues

Displaying small geographies

As you can see from the Chicago Park District's official map, large cities can have lots of small parks. (By the way, pretty sure those park boundaries are the same as the https://data.cityofchicago.org/Parks-Recreation/Parks-Shapefiles/5msb-wbxn on the data portal that @pcal linked to.)

Perhaps the current map will work fine with all those little parks. If not, I see two options.

1. Select only big parks.
2. Focus on one city region at a time.
3. Modify the design. Allow people to zoom in?

[mwichary]

In the open is fine. :·) Mind fixing the images above?

[jpvelez]

@mwichary fixed. Dropbox screenshots = not embeddable. =(

[mwichary]

I think you can just drag in the images from your desktop, but I could see them by clicking on them.

I see the design issues. The variations of scale of parks is what makes it complicated than most locations that we have so far. Would you have a couple of other examples to see how unique Chicago’s situation is?

Some ideas on how to deal with this:

· We could start supporting points instead of areas (which would enable us to do many other things, for example London Underground stations). We could actually start supporting points in addition to areas – so each area, even if small, has a little UI handle that’s clickable.

· This would still make for a lot of stuff on this map (how many parks are there in Chicago?). Note that our current solution of dropping items too small to click wouldn’t apply here, so we might have to do something else.

· Picking a specific region might be a good idea also. Or, deliberately narrowing it down (for example for only big parks, or only parks that are X). But it might strike people as arbitrary. Zooming is not something I would personally care much about, but I welcome people who want to try to make that happen.

Branding: It could go many ways. Click That ’Hood as a name is now kind of obsolete, since we have so many more things than the hoods, but maybe that’s okay. Perhaps Click That Park could be a subset with only parks, and slightly different style (hosted on another domain, but with same codebase), with the connection back and forth to CTH? Something like a pretty popular (recently) http://youdontknowafrica.com/

What do you think?

[mwichary]

@katielewis seems like the best person to think about colour scheme/branding for Click That Park.

[jpvelez]

Design issues

• @pcal how many parks are there in Chicago? There's an official distinction between "major" parks and neighborhood lots, right? If so, we could narrow down based on that.

Branding

• The "Click That Park" as a separate entity idea is compelling because it's simple. We could start with a youdontknowafrica.com style single page, and build out a landing page for other park systems if it gets traction. (National parks would be an obvious one.)
• On the other than, ClickThatHood is a fun brand. The other approach is to add sections to the existing sites, each with a sub-brand - "Click That Hood, Parks" or "Click That Park." A few possible taxonomies: * By scale: cities, countries, continents * By entity: neighborhoods, national regions, countries, languages, parks.

[pcal]

@jpvelez almost 600 parks. In the attribute table of the park shp, the PARK_CLASS field indicates the classification, based on acreage. In order from 'big to small': Magnet -> Citywide -> Regional -> Community -> Neighborhood -> Mini

[jpvelez]

@pcal If you wanted to reduce the number of parks / show the "primary ones", which categories would you display? What makes sense? You know the system best.

[edrynearson]

to keep it simple it could be a judgement call based on size / perhaps manned facilities / i'm the web manager at the park district joining in

[pcal]

@jpvelez at the citywide scale, it would make sense (visually) to just use larger parks (Magnet, Citywide, Regional). Smaller parks would work if there was a "Name all parks in my neighborhood" type game, which zoomed in on the community. Another option is to play on the naming itself, "Identify all parks named after presidents of the U.S." or something.

[mwichary]

Okay, I made some progress on supporting point locations: http://click-that-hood.com/?location=london-underground

One problem I didn’t anticipate is overlapping making it hard to click on things “behind” other things. This is something that was solved for us with never overlapping neighborhoods. Perhaps just as for polygon we needed to come up with an algorithm to discard the ones that are too small, here we’d need to come up with an algorithm collating overlapping objects into one object with a joint name?

[jpvelez]

• Why don't we try the big parks approach first to see how it looks? @pcal or @edrynearson, perhaps you could you make a kml of just the citywide/magnet/regional parks and import it to clickthathood?
• If that's not good enough, we either work go the point approach (and make all small parks into the points), or we could do a two step process where you pick a "city region" (i.e. north side, south side or maybe community areas) boundary first, which then zooms in locally and set up the game in that part of town. @mwichary would this two-step approach be very hairy to form an architectural standpoint? It would enable a whole class of "get to know your area" CTH use cases.

[mwichary]

@jpvelez, yeah, I don’t want to overthink it prematurely… if I can get my hands on some data, we can plug it in and start making design decisions.

[pcal]

@jpvelez sorry for the ridiculous delay - I've created a KML & GeoJSON. Will email to address provided on import instruction page

[brendanbabb]

I was interested in putting in Anchorage's parks in June of last year, but ran into a lot of the same challenges. I am excited to see the work you have done on the issues and although we only have 220 parks would be glad to follow Chicago's lead.

[jpvelez]

send the data to @mwichary =)

[mwichary]

So, this took forever, but I made a pass at it here: http://click-that-hood.com/chicago-parks

It actually required a lot of code changes to make happen. (Reducing parks too small to click to become rectangles, collating rectangles that are near one another into one…) What do you think?

My two questions: · Those names seem a bit weird. Should they all have Park at the end? Are first names necessary? · Is there a URL to where the dataset originally came from?