Discuss and design CCLB-facing web application

[skyinthecloud]

We need to describe the facets of the currently unspecified web application to be used by Cook County Land Bank (CCLB) staff. The following is a list of suggested discussion topics before the app could be considered fully specified:

Minimum Viable Product (MVP):

• What questions do we want to help staff answer?
• What are the expected use cases? (Which uses/questions can and can't our data support?)
• What is the single most useful thing our app can do/provide for the CCLB? (Let's make sure we excel at it.)

Functional requirements:

• What devices will staff use to access the app? Mobile? Desktop? Browser/OS?
• How fast do we expect app to respond? Efficiency/package heaviness concerns.
• Asynchronous/"loading please wait" tradeoff and acceptability (read: we have a 2GB shapefile)
• All of the above will influence web stack/technology choices; we need to decide which to use.

Data modeling:

• Although less coupled to the app itself, how are we modeling the relevant data? We have many heterogeneous data sources and ought to transform them to a unified, sensible schema.
• Which types of information will we display in the MVP?
• How can we best plan to seamless incorporate future data sources as they become available?

Beyond the summer:

• How do we expect anyone to keep using this once the fellowship is over?
  • Porting app to another server, configuration, etc.
  • Preserving and maintaining the database
  • Knowledge transfer from our team to future developers/administrators

[skyinthecloud]

Additional parameters from DePaul:

• Their dataset must not be publicly available, so we must implement secure user authentication/authorization for any interface to these data.
• We need to consider who will accept custody of the web stack (OS, web server, DB, application) and all relevant software updates; as well as user account management, etc. after the summer. We have an action item to discuss this jointly with Commisioner Gainer's office: will they hire dedicated IT to accept this responsibility?

[skyinthecloud]

I think we're safely past this point.... ;)