As with any major research or development project, it didn't take long once we got started to begin revising our work plan and schedules. With our three projects, Year of the Bay, Railroads, and Novels, the tools and user interface we're designing with the Year of the Bay and Railroads are very similar, so we've decided to group these two together near the front end of the project, with Novels interface and interaction design beginning near the end of 2013.
Year of the Bay is the most imminent, with a focus on the calendar year of 2013. We plan to launch the initial Year of the Bay site on November 1, 2012 with several content partners and crowdsourcing tools. This will complement an offline event being put together by YoTB Project Manager Jon Christensen. From the onset, users on the Year of the Bay site will be able to contribute their own content and comment on existing content. Users will also be able to create their own curated tours and collections based on all of the content available in Historypin. We'll be doing a significant amount of outreach to bring in content from a variety of cultural heritage partners, and our Research Assistants will also be doing some curation of this curated content into collections and tours. Finally, as part of the initial phase, we'll be bringing a new gallery view online, which gives a new visualization of the project content.
Phase 2 of Year of the Bay involves user interface design and user interaction research to bring more crowdsourcing tools online, beginning as early as January 2013 and throughout the winter. These will include contributions from Stamen Design which will give users the ability to position historical maps over current day maps, showing the changes in the physical environment of the Bay. We plan to follow that with tools to enable users to map photos from a number of collections and find their exact locations in Google Street View.
The Railroads project has a specific audience target, though the tools are largely the same and will follow a similar release schedule, staggered behind YoTB. In late fall 2012 and winter 2013, we'll be spending time on specific user outreach, as well as identifying source collections to include in the project.
2013 will include a significant amount of paper testing, wireframes and mockups between the design, interaction research, humanities research, and development teams, with public testing interspersed throughout.
We'll be using an instance of Redmine to track technical development from the WAWWD side, which our partners at Stanford will have access to as well.
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