Liberal Democrats: Flock Together

Do you run a Lib Dem organisation or local party?

If you’ve added any meetings for a particular organisation to Flock Together, you can now edit the details of that organisation.

Just go to the organisation page in question and hit the ‘edit this page’ link.

Many thanks to Mike Williams for his Google Maps API Version 2 Tutorial on fitting a map to data.

This has enabled me to add rather nifty maps on Flock Together to various organisation pages that automatically zoom in to fit all the meetings for an organisation snugly on the map without needing to zoom out to cover the whole of the British Isles (my earlier approach).

You can see an example on the Liberal Drinks page or the Newbury Liberal Democrats or North West Hampshire Liberal Democrats pages.

I finally did a few quick fixes to allow meetings to be deleted on Flock Together.

Historically, there were only two options: active and cancelled. But sometimes people make a mistake and enter a meeting twice, and in this case the meeting shouldn’t be shown as cancelled, but rather needs to be deleted.

The difference between ‘cancelled’ and ‘deleted’ is as follows:

Cancelled

Meeting details continue to be shown in the system and are sent out to people in the regular emails with a reminder that the meeting has been cancelled.

Deleted

Meeting details are not shown and are not sent out to people via email. It is still possible for the meeting creator or an administrator to edit the meeting.

Since ‘deleted’ is a flag on a meeting record, it is possible to undelete a meeting if you accidentally delete it.

Here, as an experiment, is a video which explains how you can add a meeting to the Flock Together site.

My first shot at this was full screen throughout and quite hard to follow. The original footage came from CamStudio. After looking at the rough cut, I then did quite a bit of work with the positioning and magnification functions in Adobe Premiere Elements to try to get closer to the action and make it clearer.

Seeing it after it’s gone through the Google Video system, it’s improved, but could probably still be zoomed ever further in than it is. I’ll also look into displaying the original Windows video file to let people have higher resolution.

Was this worth doing? Should I do any more? Any thoughts as to what trainings I should do and how they could be better than this one? Comments, thoughts and ideas most welcome.