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)

Last week John took me to see Highland Wood Energy, Scotland’s largest biomass heating company. While the idea of burning wood is not particularly new, modern chip and pellet furnaces provide a uniquely sustainable solution for regions with a natural overabundance of wood (whether from natural growth or industrial waste). In particularly isolated regions like the Highlands, the near-zero footprint of wood is an especially attractive alternative to shipping heating oil or gas from where it’s extracted. HWE’s Bruno Berardelli showed me this map (above), which illustrates the oft out-of-the-way locales where their stoves are being installed. Each installation has a strategy for sourcing the wood fuel, which in many cases can be obtained by chipping local wood. As a result, some of the forested islands of Scotland are now self-sustaining in terms of heating fuel. It remains to be seen how sustainable biomass heating will be in the future and whether any other waste streams will be reasonable as ways to heat locally.

Sourcemap was selected as part of the I.D. 40: ID Magazine’s list of 40 Transformative Design Projects of 2009. Congratulations to the entire Sourcemap team who helped make this possible! (You can see a high-resolution version of the article here).

Hopefully you haven’t experience much of an interruption in service. Our move to our new serving situation (starring our brand new server rhodium, pictured left) should now be complete. There might be some slight delays as dns propagates.

I’m very happy to announce the release of the next version of Sourcemap, Sourcemap 0.7.5. Although we usually push incremental updates throughout the release cycle, this update became a little larger than we had imagined. A number of factors contributed to this, not the least of which was the influx of a lot of new members to Sourcemap over the last two months. We’ve redesigned things visually and architecturally – and hopefully we’ve added a few new features that you might find useful. I’ll give you a quick breakdown over what we’ve done. If you want to see exactly what we’ve been up to, feel free to hop on over to our wonderful new CodebaseHQ Site to check things out.

Redesigned Interface

We’ve redesigned the interface for a Sourcemap to allow much greater control of presentation. The map has been a central part of what makes a Sourcemap (its in the name after all). Now the interface is map centric, with room to browse parts, view alternative visualizations, or simply focus on and interact with the map. We’re really happy with this direction and we hope to continue down this path and see where it takes us.

More Visualizations

We’ve always had the map, but now that we have a nice new visualization engine we hope to be able to make lots of useful Sourcemap visualizations. We’ve started with one (charting) just to get the ball rolling. We hope to develop visualizations of our own that are useful to everyone but at the same time this is a nice place for new developers to start working with Sourcemaps – by creating visualizations of areas they care about.

Community Contribution

The site now includes a first draft of a more community focused interaction. To get started we’ve added support for comments on Sourcemaps and parts in the carbon catalogue. In addition we’ve added some simple favoriting capabilities to let you flag the Sourcemaps you like.

Improved Carbon Catalogue

Since we’ve started Sourcemap a lot has happened. One of the clear things we’ve learned is just how important the idea of an open carbon catalogue is to what we are doing. We’re focusing on making the carbon catalogue we’ve been building for Sourcemap just as useful and open a tool as the other things we’re doing. Searching, sorting and browsing through the catalogue to find the kinds of parts and materials you need – whether or not you use them to build a Sourcemap – is going to get a whole lot better.

Architectural Adjustments

While you might not see them, there have been a number of architectural changes under the hood. As we’ve begun to grow as a diverse team it’s becoming increasingly important that we make room for everyone to be able to contribute. Part of this process has been making sure our code is extensible and pluggable, with lots of room to grow. To that end we’ve made more clear structures for things like visualizations, secondary content and widgets. The visualization engine will allow for a simple event based system that makes it easy to add lots of different kinds of visualizations to Sourcemap (like charting). We’ve also begun work fine tuning our feeds and our api.

Next Steps

We’re in the planning phases for our next release of Sourcemap (currently targeted towards the end of January). If you have some features you think should make the cut, please let us know