The team at the Towson University Center for GIS was left searching for another community news site after their original partner, Maryland Commons, abruptly ceased operations.
“We’ve decided to return to our original focus on education.”
“There was some concern,” said project organizer, David Sides at Towson University. They were in the middle of creating the mapping application where readers could view school districts and sift through data and information on a specific school.
“We looked for someone who would be a good fit…we thought of local TV stations with a dedicated education reporter…and we looked at other issue oriented publications.”
In time, and with the help of Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, they settled down with Baltimore Brew.
The new partnership forced them to rethink the project’s focus and scope.
Instead of a statewide mapping system, they decided to focus on Baltimore City and County.
“The initial plan,” Sides wrote, “was to change the focus on the site from schools and educational issues to a site which allowed users to search for and navigate to Baltimore Brew content via the mapping application.”
But that changed again, to better integrate education-related stories and school data into the Baltimore Brew site.
Since Baltimore Brew’s launch, publisher Fern Shen had never covered education stories because the Baltimore Sun had a reporter on the beat. But Shen believes coverage in that field is now lacking and welcomes this opportunity to add education-related content in a meaningful way.
It has not been the simplest transition. While with Maryland Commons, CGIS had spent part of its budget developing the public school performance database that the mapping application was to be based on.
When all is said and done, Sides said, “readers can click on a school and get data according to test scores…demographics.”
User-generated content will also be integrated into the map. Citizens can post data about a school or a certain event.
Once the map is complete, it will also show content that the Baltimore Brew had created for that school, from pictures to articles, allowing easy navigation based on location.
