American Whitewater is planning a day long planning session for the AW website. The session will be help February 23, 2008 in conjunction with the National Paddling Film Festival in Lexington, KY. The planning session will take place at the University of Kentucky from 9 - 5.

If you are planning on attending the event please let me know by February 1st. American Whitewater can assist with some travel expenses for people interested in attending the meeting. Travel stipends need to be arrange ahead of time, please email me at ben@americanwhitewater.org to discuss.

Below is a draft agenda for the day, if you have any suggestion we welcome your input. If you can suggest additional topics or provide some input on the topics below please reply to the post and let us know.

GPS Project (1 hour)
American Whitewater has a pilot program in California for collecting river feature GPS coordinates to make available to rescue workers. Significant steps have been completed on the project. A plan to move forward needs to be created.

Decision Points:
- Who may enter coordinates into the system?
- How will the points be entered into the system?
- How will the interface be set up?
- How will the data be validated?
- Is there any value to publishing the points in a WMS server?
- What is the most efficient way for emergency personnel to access this data?

Coding challenges (1 hour)
The website is enormous and covers a wide ranges user and staff needs. Because of the breadth and interconnectedness of the site one less-than-half-time person is not enough to develop and maintain the site. I rely heavily on volunteers to submit bugs and to update me on the status of certain features.

Decision Points:
- What steps do we need to take to cleanup the back end of the website
- What priority are fixes

Gauges (1 hour)
The gauge project is an effort to standardize the way that AW receives gauging information and allow that information to be accessed in ways that are valued by paddlers. Currently, our gauge system is written in three or four different languages and is received and handled by uncoordinated processes. When a gauge sources changes or is down, significant effort has to be made to diagnose and fix the problem. A new gauging system has been proposed that:
- coordinates data gathering in a single process on a single language
- allows interpretation of that data in ways that are valuable to paddlers
- ability to create correlations
- ability to find backup gauges when a gauge source goes down
- ability to create notifications when rivers are running
- ability to store history on all gauges
- ability to compare histories on gauges to other gauges
- ability to spatially interpret gauges (find nearby gauges, find gauges in the same drainage)
- permits updating gauge sources when you gauges come online without a significant development effort

Future Plans: integration with the new gauging system could be rolled out with the next website release in September or December of next year.

StreamTeam (1 hour)
In the past year there has been a reduction of participation in the Stream Team program. The goal of this session would be to identify reasons for the decline in participation and develop ways to improve participation.
- identify challenges of current streamteam program / reasons people quit
- Create plan to fix problems, improve interface, recruit new volunteers

User Interface (1.5 hour)
Description: The website layout has essentially remained unchanged in the four years that I've been working on it. There is a lot of functionality that is hidden underneath complexity and it is not always certain that AW's message is being received by the general browsing public. The UI effort attempts to find inefficient interfaces and retire them or redesign them and reorganize data so the breadth of the website is easy to access.

A redesigned study generally involves experts in the field of UI design, art, and marketing. A good study would also involve testing the user interface on novice users.
- Identify clear objectives for improving our user interface, key improvements needed
- Determine resources needed to make improvements (internal / external)
- Identify key goals and priorities for site redesign

Plan ahead (2 hour)
- Come to consensus on a plan to improve the foundation and user interface of the website
- Identify a timeline of projects for the upcoming 12 – 24 months

I look forward to meeting a lot of you in Kentucky!

Ben VanCamp
Outreach Director