Hi everyone. We’ve been testing this for the last week or so, but it looks like things are working out. I’m happy to share with you the next iteration of Sourcemap, Chromium. The release focuses on cleaning up a lot of bugs, some user interface improvements and some backend refactoring to make it easier for other opensource developers to jump into sourcemap.

While a full list of the features is pretty long, I wanted to just highlight two features that are interesting expansions for our code.

Support for additional map layers
We’ve added (through the widget located in the lower right corner of the map) support for additional layers of imagery, including (for example) the google satellite imagery shown below. We’ve also made the maps ’stretchy’ so they expand to fill the available space. We think these changes will make it easier to tell more compelling stories in the web map interface (the pictured map, for example, shows detail all the way down to the actual gold mine the gold is sourced from).

Support for processes and endoflife
For lifecycle maps, we’ve added support for adding processes and endoflife. This means that now, in addition to telling us a material and where that material comes from, you can say what has happened to it and where it is going to end up. For example, few products use virgin aluminum with no modifications. At the very least we would expect this to be milled and machined. Now you can make that clear. We’ve also added support for endoflife. You can let us know that something is going to end up in the landfill, incinerated or (hopefully) reused.

I’m looking forward to being able to announce the next release as soon as possible, but we have some interesting features in development. I’ll let you know more soon.

The Sourcemap Project is seeking web application developers for a project hosted by the MIT Media Lab (Tangible Media Group / Center for Future Civic Media) and the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. Sourcemap.org is an open source web tool for crowdsourcing information about where things come from, what they’re made of, and what their social and environmental impacts might be. We are building a number of extensions to the Sourcemap codebase to bring exciting new features including stand-alone web apps and touch screen interaction. The project duration is 6-9 months and will likely be extended.

Our stack is primarily ubuntu running apache, php5 and postgres.

We need developers who are:

• Excited about generating markup with PHP5 in a model-view-controller framework (we use a derivative of codeigniter);
• Great at writing good javascript (we use jquery with a light object structure and events);
• Comfortable working in distributed teams using ticketing, wikis, and version control (we use subversion);
• Knowledgeable about sql and prefer that models do the heavy lifting (but can write some joins in sql);
• More likely to write clear functions, events and libraries than rely on documentation;
• Perfectionists and realize that if you don’t want your code to break, you should probably write a unit test for it;
• Responsive to users and
• Dynamic in work plans

We are particularly interested if you have experience in:

• Web geo work, particularly openlayers and openstreetmaps
• Modern web work, javascript design and semantic markup
• Styling, css and a general sense of design and aesthetics

If you’re interested:

1. Check out our code to get a sense of what we’re doing and where we are going (sourcemap.codebasehq.com)
2. Send us a a resume, a portfolio and/or links to past projects, a code sample in javascript and some markup generation language (PHP, Python or Ruby), and any initial questions you might have.

Developers will ideally work onsite at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, but remote collaborators will also be considered if they are exceptional candidates with a demonstrated proficiency in remote work.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks to Marc Alt for inviting Sourcemap to the CEA’s Greener Gadgets conference this past Thursday – the talk generated a lot of buzz; here is some of it:

Click to See Where Everything Comes From: Sourcemap.org from the MIT Media Lab documents the global supply chain of the things we use every day. [The Daily Green]

GREENER GADGETS LIVEBLOG: Inhabitat Reports Live From Greener Gadgets! Inhabitat

We finally settled on a version of Mar’s design for our business cards, and we decided to make a Sourcemap to decide whether to order half-sized non-recycled business cards or full-sized 100% recycled business cards from Moo. So, Matt and I made two different maps (spoiler: these are a sneak peak at our new interface), assuming the paper and plastic were made in Canada and shipped to Providence for printing. Surprisingly, the non-recycled cards have 33% less carbon footprint than the recycled cards (120 grams compared with 180 grams) – you can see from the graphs that this is because the of the additional paper outweighs the benefit of being recycled. What do you think? (Your opinion is especially important if you work for Moo)