[MG] Crossforum theatre map - projecting a Vilfredo feed

[Michael Allan]

> Each room has an rss feed. The adress of the rss feed is:
> http://vilfredo.org/rss.php?room=[Name of the Room]
> ... The only exception being the common room, which is at
> http://vilfredo.org/rss.php without any name of the room.

Thanks Pietro, that's what we need.  Here's the guts:

<item>
    <title>is there a better phrase than 'open source democracy'?</title>
    <link>http://vilfredo.org/viewquestion.php?q=53</link>
    <description>...Status: Now Voting! ...Many phrases have been... </description>
    <pubDate>Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:00:03 +0100</pubDate>
    <guid>http://vilfredo.org/viewquestion.php?q=53</guid>
    <vga:generation>16</vga:generation>
    <vga:numberProposals>3</vga:numberProposals>
    <vga:status>Now Voting!</vga:status>
    <vga:room>Common</vga:room>
    <vga:shorturl>http://j.mp/g7lVYG</vga:shorturl>
    <vga:twitter>[16] is there a better phrase than... </vga:twitter>
    </item>

The <guid> appears to contain the question ID (53).  That would be
enough to put Vilfredo on the theatre stage.  We could start on that,
probably this week.  (I think it's interesting that we don't need any
modifications to Vilfredo for this.)

What about user IDs?  (Maybe this is where mods are needed?)  When the
voting reaches a stage where Vilfredo allows it, will you put user IDs
into a news item, too?  We don't absolutely need them, but it would
make things more interesting.

I didn't know about Yahoo pipes and how they can do geolocation, but
I'm not sure we can use them for that purpose.  They might fail in
some situations, as for example in fetching the geolocals for Vilfredo
users.  The common pollwiki can give us those.  (It's interesting
because we might even use it to track the physical locations of users
in real time (if they permit!).  Conseo has a use case for this that's
become stuck in my mind, as a pattern for local activism.  Tell you
later...)

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
http://zelea.com/


> The rss feed has several extra elements right now.
> 
> Over and above the usual we have:
> vga:status
> vga:shorturl
> vga:room
> vga:numberProposals
> vga:twitter
> vga:generation
> 
> The status will tell you if it is in the voting or proposing stage.
> The shorturl is the url that uses bit.ly to link to the page
> the room is the room where the question is asked
> the number proposals is the number of proposals that has been asked to
> vote among
> the twitter is a phrase that should be published through twitter
> (@Vg2A) for the question. Right now we are only publishing questions
> from the common room.
> and the generation is obviously the generation that is running.
> 
> The rss is automatically fetched from yahoo pipes, and modified to be
> then pushed into twitter.
> What happens here is that the vga:twitter is substituted to the title,
> and the the result is pushed into an rss to twitter service, that
> pushes it into twitter.
> 
> The address of the pipe fetching the rss feed is:
> http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=bb6f972cba035e3a319ef7841f2a1ee2
> 
> The pipe can run for any room, and even for any other version of
> Vilfredo, as it has two inputs, the room name, and the website
> address.
> 
> The rss after running through the pipe is then available for everybody.
> For example the address for the yahoo pipes rss for the room Vilfredo is:
> http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=bb6f972cba035e3a319ef7841f2a1ee2&_render=rss&room=Vilfredo&site=vilfredo.org
> 
> I think it would be a piece of cake for you to go to this yahoo pipe,
> clone the pipe (just click on the clone link) and change it so that
> you can have the rss as you want it. Provided you don't need any extra
> information this is probably the best way to proceed.
> 
> We are right now thinking about doing two things:
> 1) all the rooms that are all in CAPITOL LETTERS should be public, to
> the point that all of them should appear in the official twitter page.
> So we can have a SPANISH page and an ITALIAN page, and a BELGIUM page
> and an INDONESIA page, and an ENVIRONMENT page. ANd there is no need
> for the person to advertise it.
> 
> 2) [and this I don't know if it is possible] It is important that no
> one should have rights over a page. I don't want a situation where the
> first person that writes in a page gets possession of it, or similar.
> But it is useful if some pages were linked to some localities. For
> example the page ITALIA, should be linked to Italy. And ROMA to Rome.
> Now, I wonder if there is an automatic way to do it. Maybe there is a
> service offered by yahoo or google that given a name gives you back
> the coordinates they assume that name refers to. It might be often
> wrong, but sometimes right. If this is the case, those coordinates
> would end up being really useful for the geoforum.



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org