Developer Blog: Mapping Strange Times
This is a development update post by Washington Hometown’s founder, Jennifer Hackett - 4/7/20
This has been the strangest month of my life, and I am sure most people in Washington and across the country and world would agree with that statement. One month ago, on May 5th, Washington Hometown was rushing to finalize the data and design for our new OHV App, which we were hoping would be supported by advertisers and sponsors. We were planning to have the web map available by the middle of the month and to have the app in the stores by early April. We were working with OHV user groups to understand their needs and to help sponsor the app, with a skilled cartographer to help make the design work better, and with my web map and app designers to finalize the structure. I was looking forward to my daughter coming home for spring break with her roommate and we had a vacation house booked at Seabrook, one of my favorite spots on the Washington Coast. (My son couldn’t wait to have us all out of the house for a few nights as he was planning a computer gaming party with his friends.) We were starting to think about the new virus but, with just 221 reported cases and 12 deaths in the United States by the end of that day, we had not made any significant changes in our day-to-day life other than washing our hands more often.
A month later, I write this in the midst of the largest lockdown of population in world history. Cases in the US have exceeded 330,000 with over 9,500 deaths, numbers that continue to grow as I write this. Instead of being a week into her spring term at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, my daughter is preparing for her first day of remote learning on Monday. Our vacation at the beach was superseded by the governor’s statewide Stay-Home Stay-Safe order and my husband has had to give up two of his favorite activities, swimming and watching sports.
This last month we have seen examples of both the best and the worst of humanity. Stories of people hoarding toilet paper and massively inflating prices on hand sanitizer are balanced with those of people finding ways that they can make a positive difference. Every day people are putting themselves in danger to keep critical functions operating and help protect the rest of us. From doctors and nurses on the front lines of fighting the infection, to people in jobs that we often overlook, they are putting themselves on the line and making it possible for the rest of us to stay home and do our part to help stop the spread. Companies are shifting their entire operations to produce critical supplies, from distilleries making hand sanitizer, to clothing manufacturers sewing masks, or industrial firms making parts for ventilators.
As things started changing, we at Washington Hometown quickly realized that this was not the time to launch an advertiser supported outdoor recreation map, so we asked ourselves how could we use what we had built to support our community. At its core, we have two products: an extensive dataset of recreation, culture, and business resources that can be tapped to provide the information that people need in the current crisis and an integrated interactive map platform that integrates with our data to help people discover all our state has to offer.
Pivoting our products to support the current needs involved tapping into the data that we had already gathered, adding new fields so we could capture additional information that is only relevant in the current conditions, and adding new places, since we wanted to tell a story that is bigger than just recreation. Our goal, as we defined it, was to build a web map that would give the community all the information they need to navigate the crisis in a single place. We decided that we would show all recreation lands coded by the rules, but only show recreation access and facilities that are specifically authorized under the Stay-Home Stay-Safe orders (trails, trailheads, and parks/public lands with trails). We initially intended to include golf courses, beaches, boat launches, and fishing access that were not closed under agency orders, but after doing more research we decided to leave these off for now, under the strict definition of the Stay-Home Stay-Safe order. This was reinforced when we learned that WDFW has closed all fishing and shellfish gathering in the state, even though some boat launches are still technically open. We were able to use our data to quickly tell the story of recreation opportunities in these crazy times because our data is tagged within information like owner and area, so we could easily identify everything managed by a state recreation area, in a specific national forest or park, or in a given county.
Once we decided how we were going to present recreation, we started thinking about what other information people might need. We broke the data into three sets. Crisis resources: testing sites (thank you Seattle Times for your list of sites in the Puget Sound area), food banks (we have ones in Seattle thanks to First Harvest, but are still trying to get more statewide), hospitals, and just added this weekend, distilleries that are producing hand sanitizer. The second set is businesses. We wanted to help our community find the resources that they need but, even more, we want to connect businesses with customers in their community to help them survive this shutdown. We have invited businesses to submit their information, and are also pulling in data from lists that have been compiled by newspapers, chambers of commerce, and other community organizations. In addition to restaurants and grocery stores, we are adding other business that have services that comply with the current restrictions: hardware stores that are doing curbside pickup, bookstores that have an online portal, even an emergency home repair service that asked to be added to the map, and exercise studios that are offering online classes. The third category is resources to connect people to opportunities. Organizations looking for volunteers, hiring, and even groups doing online meetings or worship services can be added to our maps. (The option is available, but we don’t yet have any up on the map – let us know if your groups would like to be added.)
Our crisis map is a work in progress. We are adding more places every day, trying to keep up on changes to the rules for recreation, and looking for new ways to use the map to help our communities connect in this difficult time. Feel free to use the maps, link to them, or embed them on your site. Let us know if you have any suggestions or corrections. When things start to open up again, we will be making daily updates to the maps to help people understand the rules and find places where they can get outside. But for now, as much as possible, stay home or close to home and stay safe.
Jennifer