Community Maps Contribution Management Application Released

For the better part of my first year at Esri, I have been working on a web application for the Community Maps Program that would make it easier for program contributors to upload and manage their data contributions. We released a minimally viable version of the web application in the fall of 2012 which focused on letting users register for the program and upload data. Since then we have focused on creating an application that lets users manage the complete lifecycle of their contributions from upload, through data review, map cache generation, and finally incorporation into the Esri basemaps. This version came out of beta at the beginning of this month.

The application is for program participants only, but if you are interested in learning more about or contributing to the program you can learn more by visiting the ArcGIS Online features page for Community Maps.

As one of the front-end developers for this project, one of the technical challenges that I enjoyed was figuring out how to integrate Dojo Bootstrap to leverage the Twitter Bootstrap design that the designers came up with without introducing a dependency on jQuery. You can read my blog post on using Dojo Bootstrap with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript for more details on that solution.

I also really enjoyed working on a project that went through such a thorough design process, including usability testing, because we knew we were implementing a user experience that was going to work. See the video below of Michael Gaigg’s talk from the 2013 Esri International Developers Summit, which describes the process that he and his team went through in creating the app.