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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Now that a number of people have expressed an interest in participating in the project, I thought we should try to populate Sourcemap with basic commodity products. What do you guys think we should include? Let’s build a wish list so that we can start establishing useful standards and find out where we’re missing know-how. Some of the items to consider:
Add more suggestions to the comments section and I’ll include them in the list above. Now I’m off to make Sourcemaps!
Visual Complexity chose Jeremy’s Sourcemap of an IKEA bed for this article about Sourcemap .
We believe that the only way you can trust a supply chain traceability program is if it’s free and open, and we’re always looking for people who want to help. Right now, we’re looking for
-Product Designers
-Supply Chain and Inventory Management experts
-Life Cycle Assessment specialists
-Illustrators
-Information Visualization experts
-Web Designers
-Web developers
-Mobile developers
…and more. Please contact us to join the team.
Caroline Gregory of the Lovat Arms Hotel has posted our embed in her website – a fitting thing since she was the one who suggested mapping her guests’ trajectories to help her offset their carbon footprints and provide a carbon-neutral vacation destination!