Minneapolis Civic Garden Portal Project Seeking Feedback
The Minneapolis Civic Garden Portal Project is the part of the Wireless Minneapolis Project that determines what you see when you log onto the network. The idea is to deliver content specific to your exact geographic location in the city. I was under the impression that this would be broken out by neighborhood/community boundaries, but it looks like that’s not exactly the case. The newly-debuted wirelessminneapolis.org site states that it’s broken out by sectors that align with USIW’s wifi build-out areas.
The current state of the Civic Garden Portal Project is a result of 2 years worth of input from community meetings and an online survey (which you can still take). They’re now seeking input on what I presume is the beta phase. There’s a key that tells you what you’ll see on every portal page, and you can click through the mockups for each of the six sectors. There are also examples of what some of the pages will look like in Hmong, Somali, and Spanish.
This is the part of the whole project that excites me the most. This is the part I’m going to use the most, and probably the part that I’m likely to have the most input in.
Once I’ve had a chance to dig around I’ll post again. First blush observations?
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First blush impressions, it’s a good start. I am not a fan of the graphics on the front page (area neighborhoods, government, etc..). The corners aren’t rounded properly and I think the color choices are a bit confusing, since they’re roughly the same as the colors for the areas of the city just to the left. That seems to suggest some sort of correlation, which is a false start.
I wish there was more info about what I’m looking at…. So the only difference between the area pages are the city news, graphic header and the sponsorships? Or do all the "Area" sub-pages have different content too?
Currently I can’t access the site at all if I’m not logged in to USI, so I don’t know how deep one can follow links.For instance, Click arts then follow through to links to Arts & Museums (on the city of minneapolis page) and then through to the MIA or the Walker.. How far will I be able to follow this chain without being on paid Wifi? I’m sure a lot of local community oriented non-profits would love it if their sites were accessible for free on the wifi…
Also, I think putting a weather forecast on the homepage would be good. Seems like something that would be quite useful.