Posts Tagged ‘ecoReserve Tech’

ecoReserve adds new GIS/Mapping Engineer!

Friday, May 21st, 2010

ecoReserve is thrilled to announce the addition of Will Cadell to the ecoReserve team as Consulting Geospatial Engineer. Will has worked on a wide variety of geospatial projects since 2000. In addition to numerous traditional GIS projects, his experiences range from developing survey methods for stem mapping of Scots Pine distribution to writing open source tools for analysis of Landsat imagery. Recently, he has been spending his time building GIS capacity in First Nations communities and writing geoweb applications using the latest web technologies.

Will will aid us in completing the first version of ecoReserve’s mapping application, and contribute to our efforts to make the site’s overall user experience as compelling as possible to keep our users engaged. He will work closely with the ecoReserve team in San Francisco and our engineers in Pune, India. He will also implement our long-term GIS strategy, providing a foundation to leverage for future ecoReserve projects.

He has authored papers on low cost remote sensing solutions and a book chapter on remote sensing in Scotland. He serves on the board of the Innovation Resource Centre of British Columbia. Living in the wilderness of Northern BC, he spends his spare time camping with the family and climbing mountains.

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ecoReserve Gifts

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

As Sandy mentioned in her post about the SF Green Festival, we’re adding a feature to our initial launch: the ability of ecoReserve users to send gifts to other users. There will be a page on the site with a form that allows users to select a gift amount, and send it to an existing ecoReserve friend, another ecoReserve user, or to someone who hasn’t joined ecoReserve yet. Users will also be able to access this feature while browsing through Reservist profiles.

We’re also enhancing our “sharing” capabilities for this feature. Users be able to post the page to Facebook, of course, asking their friends to shower them with ecoReserve gifts for their birthday, wedding, or any other occasion. We’ll also allow users to send out a pre-formatted email inviting them to send gifts for those same occasions.

We all appreciate the feedback given to us at the Green Festival. The Gift feature is something that somehow evaded our initial  rfeature list, thanks to those who got it back on the list!

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Staging….

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Hi everyone –

After almost 3 months of work from planning to realization, on March 23, 2010, I launched the beta version of the InteractiveMap (I.M.) for our internal review and feed-back.

At this stage, I look forward to our colleagues’ comments and feed-back while working on the next version of the I.M., considering more features including parcels selection flexibility.

Now we have our own internal engine to interact with Google map environment to pick multiple ecoParcel and make our contribution to the conservation and restoration of our planet Earth.

It is synonym to finishing our apéritif and getting ready for the entrée.

Bon appétit

Cheers!

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ecoParcels

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Hi everyone!
This week with the help of Tamara in particular we started to put together the idea of a new spatial database where various acreage of ecological parcels could be accessed. This is important because it would offer more flexibility to our prospective users.

Also we have been working to summarize the con- and pro- of utilizing various air-borne/space-borne imagery to accommodate users’ appreciation of reserves as well as vegetation and change-detection modeling.

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Kismet: a new theory of volunteer recruiting

Friday, March 12th, 2010

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.

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Geospatial Applications

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Hi everyone!

 

As the VP of Geospatial Engineering my main responsibility is to plan, manage and implement the Geospatial aspects of ecoReserve, Inc.  which includes three areas:
1) Geographic Information Science/System,
2) Remote Sensing and
3) related Applications.

 

In this case conceptualization, planning and implementation of an interactive mapping environment for the selection of ecological parcels and for the purposes of restoration and/or conservation.

 

In my experience, developing a software application is synonymous to making food or better to say –la cuisine. It encompasses need assessment, conceptualization, planning, designing components, assembly, testing/debugging and deployment/serving.

 

Let’s start with the preparation of ingredients, running the ingredients through specific condition such sauté and/or cooking and then assembly or putting together the components under specific condition, rule and order.

 

Then a very important step which you have to consider in your mind from the very beginning of the project which is very important on how we present a product –The Look-and-Feel and/or the Presentation.

 

I will show you some snapshots or walk-through soon. It is all coming together beautifully.

 

Cheers!

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Progress… day by day

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

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.

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web performance challenges

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

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.

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ecoReserve tech blogging

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Hello everyone… I’m Jim Lynch, CTO of ecoReserve. I’m going to be blogging on a weekly basis about the development of the ecoReserve application. This is an exciting time for us, as we’re about two weeks from adding three full-time coders to our team, thanks to QuickStart Global. One engineer will be dedicated to developing the user interface, based on the excellent designs donated to us by Organic Media. Another engineer will be responsible for coding core features and functionality, while our senior developer will work with me on the overall direction of the application and the integration of Reza Ghezelbash’s GIS and mapping technology.

The first release of the application will allow users to browse rich imagery of the Mamoni Valley, zooming in to find and sponsor parcels of land, and connect with other reservists within our application and other social networks. ecoReserve will constantly evolve and improve, with many exciting features planned for future releases.

Our engineering team has been greatly aided by the contributions of key volunteers in technical documentation, system administration, QA, and user interface development. Our thanks go out to everyone who has contributed so far, and we’re always looking to add more volunteer talent to our team. If you’ve worked with Symfony (PHP framework), or any other PHP MVC framework, leave a comment below and I’ll contact you.

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