Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

Design Doc for Innovation Database of SimVillage

by Darian Hickman

06/01/06

Executive Summary

The Innovation Database is a predecessor to the video game. Here social entrepreneurs can upload information about their innovations be they microcredit programs, solar powered refrigerators, or waste management companies in Peru.

Objectives

Showcase the innovations around the world relevant to underdeveloped nations.

Organize all the info necessary for adding the technologies to the “SimVillage” game.

Give these entrepreneurs a site to upload their innovations to be considered for the game.

Requirements

Only needs to scale to 1000 innovations.

In addition to all the structured data, there needs to be a field for adding unstructured data in plain text or html form.

Must be able to upload photos to the web server, not necessarily in the database but servable by the web server.

Must support multiple accounts for users to upload. Browsing the database doesn't require an account. Hopefully we can just reuse the login code and mysql scripts of phpbb. http://www.phpbb.com/

Javascript for client-side input validation, ie, make sure numbers are numbers, emails are actual emails, etc.

Platform

Unless there is a compelling reason otherwise we shall use:

Linux server, apache web server, mysql database backend, php or perl middleware; phpbb for managing user accounts and also for forum discussions.

Must Have Features:

Add/Edit/Delete an innovation one at a time.

Export tables to csv or tab seperated values.

Browse by category, price, geography, inventor/founder, etc.

Browse all

Nice to Have Features:

Bulk Add/Edit/Delete all your innovations from a csv file.

Bulk Add/Delete images somehow.

Generic search like google for the entire site.

Click column headers and resort the view of the innovations based on that column.

Mashup with google maps displaying where the innovations are being used and also where they could be used.

Tentative Table Definitions

Most of these field come from google base attributes. A secondary objective is to make the table columns correspond with google base attributes to make it super-easy to upload my database into google base.

Table “Innovation”{

pkey id

title

description

icon (image specifically created to be the icon for this innovation within the game)

link (link to relevant website)

image link (image uploaded by the entrepreneur they want posted with their innovation.)

expiration date

label (comma separated list of keywords or key phrase, ie “public health, education, peru, waste management”)

price

installation_cost

used_in (this is a list of places be it cities, states, countries, regions)

could_be_used_in (another list of places where it might be useful)

monthly_operating_cost (how much it generally costs the customer to use the product/service)

net_monthly cash_flow (how much money the innovation produces for the customer)

}

The following lists of possible fields are straight up copied from the google base attributes list. Some of these might go in. I need to have a few more discussions with some social entrepreneurs to figure out what makes sense:

Products – items available for sale
currency, delivery_notes, delivery_radius, location, manufacturer, manufacturer_id, model_number, payment_accepted, payment_notes, pickup, price, price_type, product_type, quantity, size, upc, weight

Services – available services
currency, delivery_notes, delivery_radius, location, payment_accepted, payment_notes, price, price_type, service_type

Business Attributes

• STORE_CODE: The store code is a unique ID that you can assign to each of your business locations. These codes can help you identify your businesses at a glance.

• NAME: The name of your business that will appear in Google Maps.

• ADDRESS_LINE_1: The street address of the business.

• CITY: The city where your business is located.

• STATE: The state where your business is located.

• POSTAL_CODE: A valid 5 digit, 5-4, or 5 4 zip code.

• COUNTRY_CODE: The ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 short country name where your business is located.
  (NOTE: The Google Maps business locations bulk upload option is currently only available for the US and UK)

• MAIN_PHONE: This main phone number will appear in Google Maps.