[Cadre-politics] MVHub.com project summary

[John Miller]

For those who don't already know, the CSL is adding new features to
MVHub as part of a five-month contract with the Merrimack Valley
Workforce Investment Board, based in Lawrence.  The goal of the contract
is to promote youth development in the Lawrence, Haverhill, and
Newburyport areas.

Our tasks:

* Create a tutorial on MVHub's code so new developers can join in. (May)
* Create a data entry interface for MVHub so teens can do data entry
  this summer (June).
* Create reports based on the teens' data entry performance. (June)
* Add MVRTA bus lines to MVHub. (June)
* Give trainings to Lawrence-area agencies. (July-September)
* Create reports, for each agency, that detail how many hits each agency
and its programs have received. (July)
* Do load testing and analysis to predict how MVHub.com will perform
with 5x current load (current load is about 20 users/day).  (July-August)
* Add a zip code search to MVHub so that program results are sorted by
proximity. (August)

How things are going:

* The 40-page tutorial is finished.  It could use some polishing, given
that I've spent a few more months with the code and written some new
features.

* The data entry screens are working.  I ran over schedule here by about
a week.  Thanks to some super bug testing help from Madhu Venugopal in
New Jersey, we got the system (http://mvhub.com/cgi-bin/guide/dataentry.pl)
working in time for three teens to start data entry work.

* Luz Mangual and Chelsea Garcia, of Lawrence, and Jonathan McCluskey,
of Haverhill, have been researching Lawrence-, Haverhill-, and
Newburyport-based community organizations, slowly persuading them to add
their information to MVHub.  We've been checking in every Monday, buying
them lunch and asking how the work is going.  There's almost three weeks
of work left.

So far, the teens have sent organizational information to 12 agencies,
asking for the agencies' verification.  Of these twelve, two have
verified the information, thus making it onto the live MVHub.com site.
These agencies still have not submitted information about their
services, so their MVHub searchability will be small.

Chelsea transferred jobs a couple of weeks ago; Jonathan's leaving for
college this weekend.  This leaves Luz to handle as much work as she can
over the next two weeks, calling organizations, getting information,
putting the information into MVHub's data entry section, then asking the
organization to verify this information.

* The per-agency traffic reports are working well.  Every agency has
access to their report when they log onto MVHub.  In addition, their
six-month reminder e-mails will have a summary of the agency's traffic
report.

* The MVRTA (and updated LRTA) bus lines are in MVHub.  I don't have any
statistics as to how many people are using this information.  Perhaps
it'd be possible in the future to combine the bus lines work with this
month's geocoding work....

* The sort-by-distance feature is coming along apace.  For every program
that's returned by a search, we're querying Google Maps for its distance
from a specified zip code, then sorting the search results by this
distance.  A prototype should be ready by the end of the week (at
jmiller.thecsl.org/guide).

* As far as I know, we haven't yet started on the load/capacity testing.

That's where we're at after 3 1/2 months' work.  If you've got
questions, please send them my way!

--John

John Miller
Community Software Lab
Lowell, MA
jmiller at thecsl.org