Thanks Chris &amp; Caleb, <br><br>With the clients we work with (generally city planning departments and sometimes nonprofits) in the last 5 Ushahidi projects we&#39;ve produced for them, there are now some good design patterns we&#39;ve found that make it more usable for end users, based on testing we&#39;ve done and feedback we&#39;ve received.<br>
<br>In each project we iterate and improve the Ux, our lastest project for <a href="http://pps.org/placemap/sanantonio">San Antonio</a> has the best Ux to date and could be considered for your new base Ux.  With this though, in our next project we have more improvements we&#39;d like to make or course...<br>
<br>As for the theming, after these 5 the projects we&#39;ve produced our developer and I have several ideas on where the presentation layer needs to be more separated from the logic layer.  Of course there are framework constraints but it would be good to talk about this too. The nutshell is that for non-crisis work there needs to be more flexibility in the submit form display and modification.<br>
<br>It might best to do a Skype chat so we can share desktops and do the show and tell related to this.<br><br>And to Chris&#39;s point about converting some features into plugins we very much want to get that going, I have a list I can share in an other post to this list.<br>
<br>Sound good? Thoughts?<br><br>-Daniel<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 10:15 AM, Caleb Bell <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:caleb@...">caleb@...</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Awesome work Daniel and the rest of the PPS team! Thanks for sharing that blogpost. Along with Chris, I too am inspired by how you&#39;ve used the platform.<div>
<br><div>I&#39;d really be interested in hearing any feedback you have coming from your experience theming the platform? I&#39;ll be the first to admit that some of the default css needs quite a refresh (specificity, redundancy...etc)!</div>


<div><br></div><div>Also, I&#39;d love to collaborate with you guys in repackaging some of your front-end themes for release to the community... assuming you think it&#39;s appropriate.</div><div><br></div><div>All the best,<br>


<div><font color="#888888"><br clear="all">Caleb Bell<br><a href="http://www.ushahidi.com" target="_blank">www.ushahidi.com</a><br>US: <a href="tel:850.366.8702" value="+18503668702" target="_blank">850.366.8702</a></font><div>
<div></div><div class="h5"><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 7:02 PM, Chris Blow <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:cblow@..." target="_blank">cblow@...</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">


<div style="word-wrap:break-word">Awesome post Daniel, for me it&#39;s been really great to watch PPS grow over the last couple of years.<div><br></div><div>I&#39;m really inspired by your approach to civic engagement and it&#39;s so cool you guys are getting your programs done with Ushahidi.</div>


<div><br></div><div>I think of placemaking as a crisis prevention strategy and an inversion the typical Ushahidi deployment. All the work goes in before the crisis strikes, not in a big rush afterward. PPS makes it easy to see how Ushahidi can have an important role in urban planning, environmental justice, crime and other problems of the modern city — and it provides a model for how these projects can work over longer periods, rather than just a frenzy of volunteer work after a big disaster.</div>


<div><br></div><div>... would be great if we can help move features upstream as plugins, or perhaps repackage a new theme from some of your awesome front-end work.</div><div><br></div><div>Cheers</div><div>c</div><div><div>


</div><div><div><br></div><div><br><div><br></div><div><br><div><div>On Sep 22, 2011, at 2:28 PM, Daniel Latorre wrote:</div><br><blockquote type="cite">Hi all, here&#39;s a post about how we&#39;ve been using Ushahidi in the Digital Placemaking work here at <a href="http://PPS.org" target="_blank">PPS.org</a>.  After much work, mostly heads down it feels good to start to look up and around and share notes like this.<br>



<br><a href="http://www.pps.org/blog/digital-placemaking-authentic-civic-engagement/" target="_blank">http://www.pps.org/blog/digital-placemaking-authentic-civic-engagement/</a><br><br>We link to the source code, which is also here (2.1 flavor):<br>



<a href="https://github.com/rmarianski/pps-ushahidi" target="_blank">https://github.com/rmarianski/pps-ushahidi</a><br>Big thanks got to our programmer and Rob Marianski, and Josh Kent our Creative Director.<br><br>We made and old school fork, but in our next larger project we&#39;re going to re-code and bring it into being a branch.<br>



<br>Any and all comments &amp; questions welcome!<br><br>Cheers,<br>Daniel<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Daniel Latorre | Project for Public Spaces  | VP, Digital Placemaking<br><a href="mailto:danlatorre@..." target="_blank">danlatorre@...</a> | <a href="http://twitter.com/danlatorre" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/danlatorre</a><br>



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</blockquote></div><br></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Daniel Latorre | Project for Public Spaces  | VP, Digital Placemaking<br><a href="mailto:danlatorre@..." target="_blank">danlatorre@...</a> | <a href="http://twitter.com/danlatorre" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/danlatorre</a><br>
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