Tamara and I met with an outrageously talented woman today for lunch at Amber India next to the Four Seasons in San Francisco. She’s going to take the lead in creating what I’ll call “foundation-level CSS” to aid us in converting Organic’s designs into a world class user interface for ecoReserve.

It wasn’t her talent that prompted this blog post, though… it was her backstory. We walked through the details of a couple of sample layouts, went over some common landmines created when several developers collaborate on UI implementations… then she said something that blew us away.

“I have an external motivation… I was busted on a seatbelt ticket in Marin County… it was either community service or a big fine.” It turns out, in Marin County, and in many other areas in the US, the idea of “community service” means the donation of work to a registered non-profit.

So, all of you out there sliding through the tubes of the mighty internet… especially any linux system administrators, graphic designers, UI developers, marketing mavens… if you have a moving violation, a non-scary misdemeanor, any minor infraction for which you may choose community service as your sentence: ecoReserve… we’ll help you save the rainforest and avoid that big fine, all in a day’s (or 30 hours, or whatever your sentence might be) work.

We’re moving ahead with coding here at ecoReserve. I am pounding away at technical documentation and data models; Reza is making real progress on both the GIS/mapping layer and the interface between the map and the XHTML layer that sits “above” it. One of my engineers in Pune has started, and the other two come onboard tomorrow night. Later this week we’ll post a video screenshot showing some of Reza’s work.

One of the issues we discuss here every day is how to optimize the performance of the application we’re building. User expectations of site performance differ when browsing a modern XHTML-based site versus a google map.

We’re going to keep the user in a “static” mode as much as we can to maintain a responsive UI. “Static” doesn’t mean boring, though. Our site design will feature beautiful photography and elegant controls.

When the user wants to browse, for example, the reforestation area of the Mamoni Valley, we will switch them into Map View, with controls similar to those featured in Google Maps. In this mode, the user can select parcels for purchase, which would put them back into Static Mode to interact with the shopping cart.

Reza has built a prototype of the map layer with some low-resolution imagery, and we’re all excited to see it up on our development server with the new aerial photography being shot next month.

As we move closer to production, we’ll evaluate our options for caching, content delivery networks, and other performance tuning tools available to the PHP universe… ecoReserve will be a first-class application with excellent overall performance. Stay tuned, we’re just getting started.