…and a few insider tips and tricks for the adventurous map maker

Thousands of participants have joined the n0tice campaigns #GdnGig, #Localshopping, #keepcycling and “#Celebrate or #Change #MyHighStreet“. If you contributed you may have seen your photos included on one of our visually stunning interactive and embeddable crowdmaps.

The tool we used to build these maps is called Maptastica. Maptastica is now open so you can make beautiful maps, too.

Here’s how to make your own crowdmap:

Step 1: Choose a noticeboard

First, enter your noticeboard name in the form and click ‘Create Map’. If you don’t already run a noticeboard, then that’s the first thing to do. Go set one up on n0tice.com. Here are instructions for doing that.

The Edit wizard will open up, and you can begin customising your map.

Step 2: Start the Edit wizard

Now you can see your map and the embed code for your web page. Click the ‘Edit’ button to customise it.

The Edit wizard will then open up and several options will appear. You’ll be able to edit the header/branding for your map. You can change the colors, the focal point of the map and add widgets to the map.

Step 3: Edit the header

You can add a title, a subtitle and an image to the top of your map. Check the ‘Show header’ box. the fields to the right will then be editable. Write your title and subtitle in the boxes provided.

Then, if you want to add an image, click the ‘Add image’ box. A box will appear where you can paste the URL of your map image. It will automatically crop and resize your image to fit the space which is 200px by 100px. Enter the URL and click ‘Enter’ on your keyboard.

Step 4: Adjust the map

Choose a colour scheme. We have pre-built a blue, red and yellow scheme. If you want to customise the visual elements more, you can download the source code for Maptastica and adjust it to be precisely the way you want. We just ask that you share your work if you do that.

Then move the map around, zoom in and out, and get it to appear just the way you want. Then click the ‘Fix location’ link to set your default center point and zoom level.

Step 5: Keep tweaking

There are several more options available, including a few hidden ones.

Filter the selection of pins by keyword in order to show only the posts for a particular topic. You can turn on the Most Popular and Latest Posts widgets by clicking the button to ‘Turn on widgets’.

There are also a few options you can manually add to the embed code URL including the number of pins (p=100), or you can turn on premoderation (m=true). If you turn on premoderation then the map will only show items that the admins for this noticeboard have ‘n0ticed’ which they can do by clicking the ‘n0tice this’ button on n0tice.com.

Step 6: Add social links

Similar boxes exist for each of the major social platforms – Twitter, Facebook, and Google +. Select the box for each link you wan to add. A box will appear. Include the URL to the respective account in each box.

Step 7: Embed your map

Next, click the ‘Preview’ button at the bottom of the Edit wizard. Do you like your map? If not, click ‘Edit’ and adjust it until it does what you want.

When you’re done with it, click the ‘Get code’ button. Maptastica will automatically copy the code to your clipboard so you can paste it to your web page. You will also see the embed code in the embed box.

You can paste this code into any web page or blog, including WordPress and most other CMS’s.

Live Example: Finchley in London

The following map and embed code is an example using the Finchley noticeboard: http://finchley.n0tice.com/

<iframe style="border: none; overflow: hidden; height: 828px; width: 600px;" title="" src="http://platform.n0tice.com/mapmaker/embed.html?nb=finchley&amp;sh=true&amp;loc=51.59609368884007%2C-0.18151774311524704&amp;z=14&amp;t=What's%20happening%20in%20Finchley
&amp;d=Contribute%20to%20the%20map%20at%20http%3A%2F%2Ffinchley.n0tice.com%2F
&amp;i=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb
%2Fc%2Fc7%2FEast_Finchley_Stn_statue.JPG%2F120px-East_Finchley_Stn_statue.JPG&amp;w=true&amp;c=red" height="828" width="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Hack-a-map

Like many of the n0tice projects, Maptastica is published on github with an open license. You can get the code here:

https://github.com/n0tice/maptastica

We invite you to fork it, contribute, share it, etc. It’s in our interest to be able to offer publishers, brands, communities, etc. lots of great tools that take advantage of the n0tice platform.

So, please, hack away and invent something amazing. We can’t promise to accept pull requests, but we would love to see what you can do with this code.

Founder Matt McAlister explains:

“If you’ve been following our journey with n0tice, you’ll know that we’ve always thought of it more like a utility service more than a product. This is a great example of that.

GuardianWitness *is* a Guardian product. n0tice is merely the pipes behind it making it possible.

“We needed something of this scale to validate that model, and now we can offer the same or similar services commercially to other publishers, broadcasters and developers.

If you’re interested, we’ve begun sharing details about what we can do for you here: http://vip.n0tice.org.”

The services now available commercially include:

-   a branded web site

- branded iPhone and Android apps

- a collection of management tools, content hosted in the cloud

-  customisation options

- enterprise-level technology infrastructure

- support staff

- training for in-house staff on moderation, verification and content management best practice

All of the above comes on top of the many free facilities already available across the n0tice toolkit including the picture gallery maker HashGordon, the community noticeboards and the crowdmapping functionality.

For more information, please see  n0tice.org or contact Sarah@n0tice.com.

Editors notes

To arrange interviews or for further information, contact Sarah Hartley on 07795 455124, 0121 288 2910, sarah@n0tice.com. @foodiesarah.

- n0tice is a mobile publishing platform. It has been built to support the social-local-mobile ambitions of publishers, broadcasters, brands, communities and developers around the world.

- full details of the free open journalism toolkit are available at n0tice.org.

- the full background to the launch from Matt McAlister can be seen here: http://n0tice.org/2013/04/12/how-n0tice-was-used-to-make-guardianwitness/

The way it works is that Guardian editors publish assignments to the public, and anyone can then contribute photos and videos in response. The contributions are then woven into the Guardian web site when and where it makes sense.

GuardianWitness was developed using n0tice, the mobile publishing platform we launched publicly almost exactly a year ago. The n0tice team, our partners and the Guardian digital development team worked together to build a custom web site, iPhone and Android apps, editorial tools and enhancements to the n0tice platform.

It all runs off the n0tice API.

The services powering GuardianWitness are available to license now, too. You can find information about partnering with us here http://vip.n0tice.org/.

It’s a great case study for a lot of different things we’re working on…

1. We started the project thinking from a mobile view of the world first. The iPhone app was the driving force of the product design, and the other pieces then followed, riffing off that core proposition.
2. Media verification is not an easy problem, but technology can certainly help people make more informed decisions. The Guardian editors worked with Storyful to identify issues that may be problematic, and we then devised a tool to make the media reviewing process easier.
3. n0tice is designed to support the needs of high profile media partners. That means increasing performance through distributed delivery using tools like Elastic Search, tightening security and supporting different user authentication methods, adding performance and health monitoring tools, etc. The n0tice team also established a new technical support function so the Guardian can be sure someone is available to help.

Several unplanned things became features in a way, too.

1. We weren’t sure how to automatically stitch on a branded video pre-roll to each contribution. But we now have a video service that uses ffmpeg to transcode and stitch, and then it posts the videos to the Guardian’s new YouTube channel using the YouTube API.
2. The editors at the Guardian have a lot of great tools to work with, as you can imagine. But adding more tools is not always a plus. So, we optimized the n0tice API so that the Guardian CMS could operate as a n0tice client. The GuardianWitness ‘assignments’ are created within the Guardian tools, so it feels like an integral part of the Guardian’s publishing systems. We improved the n0tice image processing tools to serve their needs, as well.
3. The project was big and had to be done quickly, so we needed more people involved. Our core team, Dan and Tony, and the n0tice iPhone app developers at Mentally Friendly got a lot of help from the savvy Guardian digital development team and a talented Manchester-based mobile development firm called Apadmi.

GuardianWitness *is* a Guardian product. n0tice is merely the pipes behind it making it possible.

We needed something of this scale to validate that model, and now we can offer the same or similar services commercially to other publishers, broadcasters and developers.

If you’re interested, we’ve begun sharing details about what we can do for you here: http://vip.n0tice.org.

First you’ll need a notice account and then set up a noticeboard to work on your project. There’s instructions on how to do that here.

I created this one: http://elections2013.n0tice.com.

The next stage is to decide what information you want to show. For the example here I chose the candidates name, their home address, which political party they represent and which division they are seeking to be elected to.

All of that information is contained in the ‘nomination of candidates’ documentation which the local authority you are reporting on is obliged to publish. These examples are from North Yorkshire County Council and were found in a specially created Elections section on its website but they might also be filed under ‘council and democracy’.

Now you’ve got the raw data, there’s a choice of ways to ingest it into your noticeboard. If you’ve a large number of candidates, using the spreadsheet function could be useful – instructions on that here. In this case with a relatively small number of candidates I simply typed them into the system as follows:

Click the blue ‘post’ button.
Click on the blue ‘new report’ button.
Complete the form as shown below.
Click the blue create report button.

Once you have all the data on the noticeboard, creating map is simple. On the right hand side of the noticeboard you’ll see a small preview of the map with the pins from the addresses you’ve created. Click to expand and you’ll be offered the choice to share or embed.

If you’d rather carry out some design work then the web link will take you a KML file to treat in the usual way. If you’d like something that looks like the map at the top of this page – give me a shout on sarahATn0tice.com and we’ll sort you out.

Forget Google Hangouts and Skype conference calls though, we’re inviting n0tice users to an afternoon in London for a meeting and greeting, brainstorming, blue sky thinking knees-up. Well, we may not quite be dancing the afternoon away but we will most definitely be prompting some very thought-provoking discussions and activities.

This is an opportunity to not only meet some of the n0tice team (the worker ants behind the n0tice community and developer platforms) but to feedback on issues and concerns, and contribute to developments for the future.

Whether you use n0tice as a community journalism platform, to share happenings in your local area or about your favourite pastime, or to build mobile publishing apps, your contribution is always appreciated. And despite our online community being just that – online – there is still something very dynamic and valuable about personal connections.

Back in August last year, after our initial meet-up I wrote: “Get offline, be the eyes and ears of your little corner of the world, be the real person behind your notice board, and truly notice what’s happening near you”.

Eight months on, as many of us are probably even more attached to our gadgets and online tools, this sentence still holds true. In which case, Friday 19 April is your opportunity to down tools and join other n0tice-ers for a fun yet constructive afternoon.

The venue details:
Friday 19 April
1 – 4 pm
Timberyard
61-67 Old Street
London, EC1V 9HW
www.timberyardlondon.com
Closest train stations: Old Street and Barbican
Bus routes include: 55, 243, 4, 56

Email kathryn@n0tice.com to let us know you’d like to come or if you have any questions.

It is a major issue many of us are having to cope with and improving the care and experiences of people with dementia is a key commitment for the Department of Health.

Alongside the medical help and interventions, there are events for people with dementia and their carers going on around the country, helping to bring people together and keep those all important social connections alive.

As part of the Dementia Local initiative, a map created by local groups and individuals has been launched to show where those activities are taking place.

The team at NHS Choices have just started a map – which you can see on the support pages here – is powered by n0tice via this dedicated noticeboard: http://dementialocal.n0tice.com.

It allows anyone to post details of an event aimed at people with dementia or their carers to share it more widely. As well as appearing on the NHS Choices website, the n0tice technology means that it is also easily found via major search engines and can be easily shared.

Introducing the service, the website says:

“There are excellent information resources all around the country on dementia……

“People with dementia are best served if we all work to create dementia-friendly communities. That needs to start locally.”

Visit the map and help us spread word in your local area

View Larger Map

Useful links

• NHS Choices support pages.
• Alzheimer’s Society.
• Talking Point – Alzheimer’s Society’s online forum.
• Dementia Friends – launched by Prime Minister David Cameron to create a network of a million Dementia Friends across England by 2015.
• Carers Direct helpline free on 0808 802 0202

* If you’ve a group or organisation which needs a similar map for users, there’s more information available at n0tice.org or drop me an email at sarahATn0tice.com.

While you may enjoy some of the new features across all these products, the most significant change is in the engine powering what we do.

Some background first…last fall you may have joined one of the campaigns we developed with our marketing partners at LBi.

We tried to raise awareness around the changes and things to celebrate in the local high streets across the UK. We initiated a campaign encouraging people to #keepcycling through the cold and dark months (are they over, yet?). We developed a crowdmap for live music gigs in partnership with Guardian Music. And we developed a similar campaign encouraging people to shop locally at independent retailers.

That effort led to some new partnerships – from marketing (Divine Chocolate) to shopping (BigBarn) to publishing (…coming soon).

We suddenly realized that our original vision for the n0tice platform and partner ecosystem was nearly mature enough to offer commercially. It just needed a little more juice.

So then in December, Tony McCrae started looking at supporting multiple large scale professional publishing partners like our own friends and colleagues at the Guardian.

For example, while our search index Solr was great at powering the API, we knew it would get expensive and suffer performance problems in about a year’s time. So, Tony used the quiet Christmas period to move the API over to Elastic Search…in a matter of weeks, magically.

We improved our client libraries and also upgraded our testing, deployment and security profile. The user authentication service was completed…we now support OAuth 1.0a. And we’re adding bug and issue tracking, performance monitoring and health checking – the types of things any commercial SLA would expect to us to provide.

We’ve written a Platform Architecture overview if you want to learn more. It’s on a new developer platform web site we’re working on at http://developers.n0tice.org/.

There are also several new tools that our partners wanted which we’ll be able to offer more broadly soon.

So, after all this enterprise-level architectural work, we needed to eat our own dog food.

The n0tice web site, iPhone and Android apps were able to take advantage of this new power (not without a few unfortunate interruptions during the transition, of course) and upgraded the way they interact with the platform.

In the short term, you’ll feel the results as a user in terms of speed, reliability and visual impact. In the long term, more tools and technologies and partners and apps and campaigns and all sorts will be available to you both as a user and as a noticeboard owner.

Whether you’re a publisher, an editor, a broadcaster, a community leader, a local government authority, a campaigner, a marketer, a developer, a platform, etc. we are going to give you some really useful resources to help you with mobile publishing.

If you want to see and share what’s happening nearby, or if you want to give the power to your customers or your local community to see and share what’s happening nearby, then n0tice is there for you.

We haven’t unveiled all the details of what’s available to partners or how to partner with us, yet. But we’re happy to talk to folks who want to learn more.

Contact david@n0tice.com, or have a look at the developer platform web site to see the most current technical documentation.

Meantime, we hope you enjoy the upgraded n0tice web site, iPhone and Android apps. As always, please join the conversation in the n0tice Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/n0tice/

Speaking at a recent Out of Hours Hyperlocal event hosted on Google +, the site’s publisher explained how the plug-in works with the contributions from the public, open space of the noticeboard at http://tongwynlais.n0tice.com.

The resulting selection of events shows at the site’s events section in this impressive calendar format which can also be filtered by categories and tags.

Learn more about how that was created with the video below which was archived from the event – the relevant section starts at 50 minutes.

There’s more about using n0tice for an events calendar here at the n0tice.org toolbox site which includes other ‘howto’ articles and ideas for publishers.

Picture the scenario – you’ve got the time agreed, bought your ticket, travelled across the country and, finally, you’re there, tweeting away from the conference. You know you’ll not forget that speaker/link/picture/reference because it resonated so well with you but then you return to the office to share it and……it’s nowhere to be seen. If you’d had the foresight to favourite some tweets then maybe you can gather your thoughts – or hope someone creates a Storify which happens to curate your choice of tweets – or alternatively, have everything automatically tracked in n0tice for later, leaving you the time to concentrate on post-conference socialising. We’ve already tracked several events using the n0tice tools so here’s how to set it up to capture everything from an event and give yourself a break.

1. You’ll need a user account – sign up at n0tice.com.
2. Once logged in, go to the ‘my noticeboards’ link and click to ‘set up a new noticeboard’.
3. The noticeboard will be the place where all your content is saved and published online – think of it as your workspace – but it is public on the internet so give it a name which will mean something to people searching for the event.
4. Log into feedton0tice.com and follow the instructions to set up the feeds you require eg. twitter, flickr etc. using the guide here.
5. Sign off, sit back and enjoy your conference.

Once your ‘bot’ (automated feed) has captured everything on the noticeboard, there several things you can do next. Check through the feed and easily create your own report of the events main points by selecting the ones you want and using the facility to embed the tweets into a story, like this from last week’s Virtual Community Summit in London. @CarolineRadar tweets: The offline world is a minefield – managing expectations of what moderators should manage is very difficult, esp parents #vircomm13

@AthikurRehman tweets: Online Strategies should be driven by #SocialMediaAnalytics Monitoring can help brands with great insights #vircomm13 @VirCommSummit
And you can write a commentary around the individual items in a similar way to Storify. @vdimauro tweets: fantastic storify board of #vircomm13 – proud to have been a part of this amazing day! http://t.co/SfwRxzjL via @emoderation

With pictures, you can use the HashGordon.com app to create a picture gallery like the one at the top of this blog poast. I created that by using the filter to only publish the few pictures I selected from the entire number by ‘n0ticing’ them. There’s full details about using this tool here.

Stories and pictures of intrepid cycling have been coming into the dedicated Keep Cycling noticeboard over the winter months – so it’s time to celebrate your efforts.

Just check out these to get a flavour of what’s been going on:
Photo by detailista: “Cycling into the sunrise. Bring on nights of pushing home into sunsets.
#keepcycling”

@chrisgdack tweets: Rain has stopped and (dare I say this but) it is quite mild out @n0tice #keepcycling (@ Catherine De Barnes) http://t.co/52BZxWHF

Photo by alexwhittaker: “Beautiful morning in the park #keepcycling #eastlondon”

All that effort deserves some reward, so our delicious partners at Divine Chocolate have come up with something extra special this month.

As well as a prize for snapping and sharing the best view from wherever you’re cycling, all you London cyclists can also claim free chocolate on Keep Cycling Day which is Tuesday 5 March.

All you need to do is cycle up to the Divine pop up shop at Seven Dials in Covent Garden on day and chocolate rewards will be yours – just take your bike/helmet.

The pop up shop will be open for two weeks from the 25th of Feb but you’ll have to pedal there on the dedicated #keepcycling day to claim your prize.

But if you’re not near Covent Garden, don’t worry – there’s a lot of Divine goodies up for grabs wherever you are. To join in simply snap your favourite cycling view and help us to map the country’s top cycling route as follows:

Post it to the #keepcycling noticeboard at www.keepcycling.n0tice.com with Twitter or Instagram.
Make sure you turn location on and hashtag your post with #keepcycling, to see your pictures and reports pop up on this n0ticeboard, and feature in a guide that showcases the best of cycling this season.