Repair directory

[Panda]

1. Will http://map.restarters.net be used for other things than the repair directory? If not, it’s not a good url!

2. It would be good if the map could get the location from the browser. (Is it centred on Chadwell Heath near Romford for everyone or just me?)

3. The default view when opening the map should show some repair business. It should show something interesting before having to answer any question. If you don’t have any location available, find an interesting one to provide the map for: if it has to be simple it could be Restart HQ. Otherwise it could be centred around a random business and also show future local Restart Parties or stats from recent local ones. Anything but an empty map of the surrounding of Chadwell Heath, which I’m sure must be a very interesting location otherwise (e.g., Mary Wollstonecraft lived there briefly!).

4. It would often by really convenient to have a list of local repair shops. I’d suggest not having to enter what needs fixing. Depending on how you can select the repairs, a county or borough, or a postcode and a distance from that postcode, and create a page listing the details of all the businesses indicating what they fix. Such a list could easily be shared and even possibly printed on dead trees (with a fixed printer found on the pavement, recycled ink and paper of course).

[neil]

Thanks @panda, I’ll CC in @James_Diamond and @ugo here for their thoughts.

@Panda

Will http://map.restarters.net be used for other things than the repair directory? If not, it’s not a good url!

It’s been mooted to include other things - community repair groups, ‘roving repairers’, etc. But no firm specs for that yet. For the URL we did briefly consider things like directory.restarters.net, repairdirectory.restarters.net, but they felt a big wordy or non-specific. What’s included and what it’s called are definitely open for discussion.

@Panda

It would be good if the map could get the location from the browser. (Is it centred on Chadwell Heath near Romford for everyone or just me?)

Agreed. And if the user chooses not to share location, then as you suggest in the next point, a more interesting ‘generic’ location could be used. Bearing in mind that we hope to extend beyond London with this - your suggestion of Restart HQ is a good one that seems like a reasonable fallback wherever you are in the world. I honestly don’t know how we ended up with Chadwell Heath as the current default centre point!

@Panda

The default view when opening the map should show some repair business. It should show something interesting before having to answer any question.

Agreed.

@Panda

It would often by really convenient to have a list of local repair shops. I’d suggest not having to enter what needs fixing.

I agree - you can actually do that at the moment, but it’s badly worded as ‘Please Select’, given that you don’t need to select anything.

@Panda

Depending on how you can select the repairs, a county or borough, or a postcode and a distance from that postcode, and create a page listing the details of all the businesses indicating what they fix. Such a list could easily be shared and even possibly printed on dead trees (with a fixed printer found on the pavement, recycled ink and paper of course).

Agreed. We’d like to make it so searches are shareable, most simply just by a URL. I think a printable version would be good too.

[James_Diamond]

There are fields in the Repair Directory data that are not indexed in Map and Admin search.

Field: Borough / Local Area could be used to bring up eg places in Hackney. As this field is not searchable I’ve adopted a workaround including the borough name in the 1st address line. The work around is fine for the Admin search but doesn’t work in the map search.

Field: Products repaired. I’ve been using this to add more detail when the categories are not specific enough, for example iPod. But this is not included in the map search which is limited to the categories.