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Proposal from knightcontest.com

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Drupal Advanced Survey Module with Geo-specific Result Reporting and Mapping

Primary Contact Name

Mr. Ryan Szrama

Describe your project

Drupal Advanced Survey Module with Geo-specific Result Reporting and Mapping: Bringing real survey support to the most cutting edge platform for online news outlets and citizen journalism communities.

The Drupal Advanced Survey Module (hereafter DASM) is the answer to a long standing void in the Drupal website development community. There is currently no decent solution for surveys in Drupal powered community or journalism websites. The Drupal project itself has to rely on third party survey applications to survey its users and developers! DASM will allow content administrators on Drupal powered websites to post simple to complex surveys with survey item types ranging from multiple choice and select box questions to the more complex item rating and ranking questions. DASM surveys may be posted to the general readership or to targeted audiences with variable run length times and notification options. Quality assurance features will prevent abuse and restrict survey access where appropriate. DASM survey results may be displayed in any number of formats to either administrators, readers, or both. Default options will include simple text based result summaries, graphical representations using pie charts and graphs, and maps with plotted survey responses. Survey results will be filterable based on any particular survey item, like a zip code text field. For example, a Louisville, KY based newspaper could survey its readers on a local political issue and plot the percentage of responders in favor of or opposed to the issue on a Google map by zip code. IP address lookup also makes it possible for locations to be stored automatically, and integration would be provided with other existing geolocation modules. A major benefit of DASM is the fact that it will be developed as a Drupal module. This makes it instantly available to every Drupal powered journalism or community site in the world. It also enables simple integration with many awesome Drupal modules pertaining to drawing, mapping, workflows, locations, and more. See the proposed feature list on page 5 of DASM proposal.pdf for more information.

Primary Contact Email

ryan.szrama@gmail.com

Organization or Business Name

By Wombats

Who would want to use it and why?

DASM will be useful to any Drupal powered news or community journalism website, whether it's a high profile site like Now Public or a smaller site targeting a specific geographical regions or community. Localized sites may specifically take advantage of the module to poll their readers on local issues and events. Results may then be displayed simply in any number of formats to best represent the data collected. Until now, no decent, native survey module has been available to these sites. Developers will be inclined to use this module because of its integration with the core Drupal APIs and other applicable contributed modules. Administrators will have a simplified user interface for creating and publishing surveys and results, while responders will similarly have a hassle free time completing the survey or poll.

Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project?

I have been developing websites and modules with Drupal for over a year and a half, and I totally love it. I love being a part of a global development community, and I love taking opportunities to contribute to it. I certainly have the motivation to produce this module and the devotion to the community to see it adopted and made useful for as many people as possible. Furthermore, for the last year, I have been the project manager, community spokesman, and lead developer of the Ubercart project, an extensive e-commerce suite being developed for Drupal. Through the process, I have become well acquainted with the various Drupal systems and APIs necessary to create powerful modules in Drupal. I have also honed my eye for usable interfaces as we constantly work to make Ubercart an easy to use application. In terms of experience, I have all the technical knowledge necessary to create a survey module that conforms to Drupal coding standards, integrates with the appropriate popular contributed modules, and most importantly, is easy to use for both administrators and responders. Finally, as the lead developer of the Drupal coding group, By Wombats, I have a growing talent pool of interested developers who are (almost) as passionate about Drupal development as me. This includes other core Ubercart developers and the contributor of the drawing API (known as snufkin) who has experience integrating his module with Drupal systems to produce various types of charts, graphs, and maps. There will be no lack of talented associates to make sure the work gets completed, tested, and publicized! Finally, as an active member of the Drupal community, I have received valuable feedback on module implementation strategies in the past. My developer blog is aggregated at Planet Drupal, so posts related to this project will reach a wide audience of developers who will then put this module to use for their clients.

U.S. State

Country

United States

What potentially bigger thing might happen if everything went perfectly and the stars all aligned?

Assuming everything falls into place with the module and its development, we would be able to publicize it and make known its feature set to journalism sites. Many sites would start to use this in conjunction with their reporting to get visitor feedback on articles and issues and incorporate the results into future stories or site changes. This would be a valuable feedback tool for site owners trying to gauge the effectiveness of their sites in reaching their target audiences and having a real impact on local communities and issues. The architecture for the module would support plugins for new question and reporting types, so as sites and developers get on board they can start contributing back to the module set to extend the survey module's features. Furthermore, Drupal install profiles could be setup that would allow people to include surveys and polls in their sites or even develop an entire site just around a survey. This would facilitate one off survey sites like the Drupal site used to track the success of Radiohead's CD barter for In Rainbows. It would also make it easier for independent bloggers and journalists to incorporate reader feedback into their articles and site development plans. Integrating with tools like Google Maps could have huge implications for citizens of a specific community to see how people nearby feel about surveyed issues. It can help those involved assess the impact of a survey participant's location and demographic on their viewpoints and survey responses. Eventually, we'd like to see modules organizing results into things like trends over time periods so community groups can gauge the effectiveness of their activities and change their approaches to better achieve their goals.

How will you be able to measure whether or not your project has really made a difference?

This is very simple... first, we look for "market" penetration. In other words, are the sites that we view as likely candidates for survey capabilities taking advantage of the module? Are other Drupal applications that would benefit from offering advanced surveys to their users (like CiviCRM) integrating the module into their basic feature set? Since we're not looking to sell a product but increase Drupal's viability as a platform for journalism sites, we would see how many sites take advantage of the tool and use it regularly. The community will also offer up feedback on the usability of the module and its interfaces and the usefulness of it on their sites. This has happened with other modules such as Tagadelic and can surely happen with a much more powerful module like this. We want to know that site administrators are able to incorporate this into their sites and that site visitors are taking part in the polls and spending time viewing the results. There will be no way for us to directly monitor this, since we won't have access to everyone's servers, but having developed this module it would be simple for us to then create a survey on our blog site where people can give us valuable feedback on how to make this a better tool for their communities and sites.

Web site

http://www.bywombats.com

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge

$45000

What unmet need does your proposal answer?

Currently, there is no good, robust survey solution for Drupal. The Drupal project itself is forced to use third party survey tools when it wants to run a community wide survey. If a good solution exists, surely Drupal.org of all websites would be using it. This means that existing and future journalism sites developed in Drupal will be lacking functionality that has become widely used and expected in outlets providing statistics, accepting reader feedback and opinion, and reporting on community activity. This module would meet that need and do it in such a fashion that 95% of cases would be addressed. For the fringe, a plugin system would be built into the module to support whatever custom modules need to be developed. Furthermore, only the poll module built into Drupal (which is for single questions) offers any sort of result reporting. However, it is severely limited and does not offer any sort of data filtering or breakdown like I envision for the geo-specific reports generated by our advanced survey module. Data doesn't just need to be gathered... it needs to be stored logically and accessible to administrators and users to view and digest. The simple inclusion of survey results in articles and on pages in admin specifiable formats will facilitate this. For example, a news article related to a councilman's public policy may be accompanied with a survey polling users on their approval of his job.

Total cost of project, including all sources of funding

$60000

What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general

Basically, it will be more robust than the existing solutions, provide a better user interface for administrators and users, and actually handle the organization and display of data. This project is quite ambitious in its goals, and I believe they are all attainable with the developers and experience we have at By Wombats. If we simply put an initial release up, it will immediately be more useful than the current Drupal offerings! By simplifying the construction and reporting of polls and surveys, we're making a module that will get wide exposure. By focusing specifically on the needs of sites targeting geographical communities, our module and therefore Drupal will be one of a kind in allowing small, medium, and large journalism sites a free, easy to use survey program fully integrated in a CMS.

Expected amount of time to complete project (in whole years):

1years

How will people learn about what you are doing?

The project will be managed through Drupal.org, so it will be immediately visible to anyone who visits the site. Furthermore, I and and the team will blog about our activities through the By Wombats site. Drupal posts here are aggregated to the Planet Drupal and then dispersed to many sites and feed readers aggregating the content there. In short, a single post to our personal blog will be delivered to hundreds of other developers and made visible to thousands of potential users. Community interaction is key, as I'm sure many people have ideas about how this can be most useful. As such, we will open a section of our Ubercart forums specifically related to the Advanced Survey Module and link to it from the project page at Drupal.org. The issue tracking capabilities of Drupal.org will be used to track feature and support requests, brainstorming, and bug reports.

Do you have any other funding or investment? We’re interested in knowing who else is interested in your project.

Aside from those who have expressed interest in using the advanced survey module in their community and journalism sites, we are going to seek sponsorship from members and developers of the Ubercart community for the support of the development. Ubercart has a growing e-commerce community with people using e-commerce for a variety of needs, and many such sites incorporate surveys for customer feedback. We're sure there are people willing to sponsor development to get customer feedback surveys and product use surveys. As such, we'll also donate paid Ubercart developer time to manage the community aspect and publicizing of the project.

Are you working with anyone else to complete this project? If so, please give names and what they would do?

The current plan is to have developers from By Wombats focus on developing, supporting, and maintaining the module for the years to come. We have a network of other developers who may or may not lend their expertise to the project. There are bound to be members of the community who are willing to blog about, use, and write tutorials for the advanced survey module. Furthermore, if we find an area where our knowledge is not enough, we have a network of friends and developers from the Drupal community at large that we can tap into for free and paid development support where need be.

Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area?

Since we're looking at Drupal, the alternatives are the built in poll module, the outdated survey module, and a webform module. These are maintained by core maintainers or other contribution developers, but there is no aggressive plan for improvement on these modules. They mostly focus on e-mailed results or simple one shot polls, and the core module in particular is more likely to be cut from development in future versions than extended. While others have focused on creating customizable forms, there are no projects actively working handling survey type form questions and result reporting like we have outlined in the advanced survey module proposal. There are third party tools that provide survey functionality, but none are integrated with Drupal or a similar CMS. We'll be blazing a new trail here and providing Drupal an edge in the competitive open source CMS world as the premier tool for local community and journalism sites.

What do you guarantee will happen if you complete the activities in this proposal?

I guarantee that the module will be published with full documentation and examples of use. The module will be published with the GPL license as an open source project through Drupal.org so other companies, developers, and one shot site owners will be able to use this in their site development. The tool will be easy for people to use, and the result reporting will be useful to a broad range of survey and site types. The module will be blogged about, discussed in forums, and publicized over the web through the Drupal community (esp. Planet Drupal). This means the creative genius of potentially dozens of developers and site administrators may come to bear on the project. At the very least, people will know the module exists and know how it may be used. A demonstration site will be put up so people investigating the module for us on their sites will be able to test drive all aspects of the module package - from survey participating to viewing results to creating new surveys and reports. The functions and modules developed in this project will be extensible and reusable. The developer APIs will be documented through Drupal.org so as many people as possible can access the documentation and write other modules to interface with the advanced survey module. We will do everything within our power so that the community is empowered to use and participate in the development and usefulness of this module.