G'day everyone, I'm Neil, Christchurch, New Zealand, so another Kiwi, great to hear. Bit of a Kiwi overload at the moment, but that's fine. So I'm here to talk to you about one of the projects I've been working on. So I've got an agenda, I'm going to do a quick introduction to our company because

they want me to do that, and the project, the challenge, why I chose open source, the solution and tech stack, and a quick look into the design and then I'm going to try a bit of a demo, so I'll try my luck there. Can people at the back hear me all right? Sweet, that's a good start. Just to put it out there, I'm not a big fan of Macs, so if this screws up somehow,

blame Apple. We'll go from there. Also, the other developer who worked this on me presented this at Daruss Al-Amman, he had 25 minutes, I got 15, same content, so I'm just going to speed on through. Okay, Orbica, we started about 18 months ago just being my boss and we've grown to

I think 22 people now. Our purpose is pretty simple, we just try to create and inspire geospatial champions and that's pretty much the gist of it. Okay, so on with the actual project. This was, the aim basically was regional council rates and budget data.

I'm trying to show that out to all the rate payers and provide transparency about what's going on with their rates. In context, I'm from Canterbury, Christchurch in particular. It's one of the largest territories. It contains Christchurch, which is the third largest after Krabby Auckland and Wellington.

So, still one of the best. The challenge basically, they needed something to be easy to use and interactive and find a nice experience for the users, increase engagement and understanding through their transparency of their data, explain these complex portfolios and programs

in again an easy to use way and be cloud hosted and allow for multiple years. Which they said multiple apps are sweet, so I went with that. Why open source? Integration, it's coming from a lot of different departments. Some GIS, some not GIS. We were able to substitute the licence cost.

Instead of using the licence cost, we used it to play. It gave us freedom. Again, low implementation costs and a scalable and awesome community. So basically, the solution is just a tool that allows the councils to share and update their rates information and it's a nice way to visualise for the residents

to see spatial and non-spatial data in the same platform. As well as a narrative that helped them along with the process as well. Technology stack, a whole bunch of stuff. QGIS was mainly for a couple of playing with data and all the others kind of just made their way in there.

The solution workflow, that was basically it. So as I said, the CSVs kind of came from that financial department. GIS gave us shape files and the comms and marketing were able to modify the application itself to look and feel the way they wanted it to feel and update with these stories.

And all of that pumped through to our Postgres database and out through GeoServer into the application. This is just a quick slide on showing that little transformation in the design, I guess. So it's went through quite a few iterations and that was basically it. I think it comes to an end there.

All right, the tricky stuff. So I am going to attempt to try and demo this live. I do understand what that means when it doesn't work. All right, yes. Damn it! What's happening here, man? This is not my thing. How'd you do that? I don't know.

Your computer. You turned it off. There you go. Yay! So this is the site here. They've got a little narrative down the side. Oh, scrolls don't work in that. So they basically can enter in their own stories there.

It gives you a little breakdown of the rates information. They've got general, targeted, grants and other. So this is an overall view. This is all their projects that ECAN is involved in. And down here we have their portfolios. So if we click on one of their portfolios, we can see that it's broken up into programmes.

So we can come here and investigate each bubble and see what it costs, where all the money's going. And if we click here, it's going to give us a little bit of a breakdown, as well as that actual narrative that I was talking about before. And it's cool when you kind of smash through them.

Pretty fast, they smash into each other. It's a bit of fun. Map view, very simple. This is just a quick way of showing people what's exactly going on. I believe this one's got a nice boundary. A lot of them are general rates, so you get a blank New Zealand thing. So that's not so great. Let me find a better one.

So again, this updates our chart over here, gives us information. And we can check out the individual values and where that money's coming from. And they've got a little section in here they wanted to say, OK, type in my address.

Oh, that's my house. Please don't knock on my door. And we can go ahead and look at the individual rates, if I actually own my own house, what I would be paying. Unfortunately, I'm still on that track. So we can go here and see exactly where our general rates are going,

what percentage each section comes out. And it's broken down into different portfolios. So that's the application itself. Well, as I said before, they wanted multiple applications. So basically we built CMS behind it. So they can come through and create their own app.

I'm going to try and do that now without screwing it up. So go ahead, just check to make sure that app's not in there. Yes. And we upload a CSV. Desktop, yes, good old desktop. CSV, there we go.

And we can go ahead and auto populate it from other apps, which I'll do because it's a lot easier. Your scroll's the wrong way around. And we can go in there, chuck that in, and all of a sudden it just populates our thing. So basically we're mapping our tiers of information to the different sections. And we can go down here when I scroll the opposite way,

and it works down this way. So I'll quickly fill these out. Sorry, apologies for me speeding through. I'm trying to put it through as quickly as possible. And yes, that was Pac-Man. Again, we can pop up there. We immediately get a little bit of a visual for what's going on with our information.

And I'll go ahead and just quickly pop these in. Stuff around with that. Make it a little bit easier for myself. So I can just stick in a couple of bits of information here. These are just the generic CSV that I've got. And I'll call it TS1.

So these are basically just the pop-up information for our little pop-up over here, which is going to be the hover on our pop-up on the bubbles. So we submit that. Yep, again, Pac-Man. He's a popular guy. Then we start uploading our shape files

so that we've got one for a more, I guess, specific boundaries and then more your regional boundaries. I like to call this the big aggregator because that's literally what it does. And then we can come through and start selecting our boundaries. Design a map.

The scroll is awful. Why do people buy these things? So we can set up minute max zooms as well, which limits it on the map as well. So here's basically what we've got. So we can zoom through all that. Submit. Away it goes.

And we do have two different things going on. We've got a nice little summary table that I quite like. And again, it's just another aggregator and another way of displaying a whole bunch more information. So submit that. In a way, it builds our application.

Now we're going to delete that because that's a pain in the ass. So away we go. This is essentially what we call our development. So we can come through here and start changing a few things. If I want, I can edit some text. Add some story. Not a great story writer, so that's all I'm adding.

And I can come through. Oh man, this scroll is awful. Okay. So I can come through here and decide to change my colours. I can change my chart colours if I want to as well. And there's a whole bunch of icons. Sorry, I don't have any pictures. Otherwise I'd upload an icon.

And we simply just hit save. And I can push that to our test site. Which I have. Oh, great. No, that one is not. Oh, I know why. It's trying to get me to log in again.

I'll just log in myself. Apologies.

If I reload this, we should... And there's my colours changed. So if I do that again, come through here, do a nicer one. I can change to whatever colour I feel is necessary.

That's a beautiful colour. So I'm going to save that one. And push to my test site. Which I can now just reload. And colours change. Beautiful. So that's essentially it. It's very straightforward. We try to make it as easy as possible to come through.

We can also go ahead and start moving around titles and things like that. And if you want to change bubbles... This mouse is so touchy. All I want to do is go up.

Alright, okay. So we can slightly move our bubbles or whatever. So if the app looks ugly, it's usually the comms and marketing people's fault. Because we didn't want to do that kind of thing. To be honest, even though we're a consultancy, I like to make money. I don't want to make money doing this kind of thing. It bores me. So it's much easier just to hand that over to them. And let them go crazy and do whatever they want.

And they do. So each individual one, they can put stories down to the level of their programmes. Right from high level story all the way down. So that is basically that lot. If I can go back to this presentation.

Okay, so basically the road ahead was... This is kind of, we're looking at developing this into more of a visualisation platform for all the regional councils. So we have a common platform for all of New Zealand. You go to a different region, same thing.

You understand what exactly where all your rates are going. Other regional councils start to get in on it. So that's great. And we are pushing past just rates. Because rates gets kind of boring after a while and you want to throw something else in there. So we're playing with like throwing our company's data in there and looking at the projects. Boss said don't put that up, so I won't.

But basically creating that unified look and feel across all the different visualisations. So we've done a bit of work. Currently it's not on mobile. But we are pushing that out. We've kind of done a, I guess a V0. Which is great. Which we'll be pushing out at some stage early next year. So that'll be a bit of fun.

That's basically all I got. Has anybody got any questions? I was just wondering, can you use the different visualisations as well, like other than... Other than the bubbles in the map? Yeah, yeah. Well that's the plan in the long run.

Again, we're thinking of consultants here. We've got to bootstrap the thing. Get it up there. But we're kind of hoping to start switching it out and making a little bit more of an open platform. So is, a lot of you work around this platform here specifically? Or is this sort of one of the examples of the tools you're building? Yeah, this is just one of the many things that we end up doing, to be honest.

It's the one they kicked off, because I guess people like smashing stuff together. But yeah, we've got a range of stuff. BGO's, consultants. We've got a massive range. We just like to play with tools, really. I just had a couple of questions. How long was the idea to launch?

And are you, in the future, looking at how you can take on comments from the community, for example? Yes. Yes. So basically, it was quite a long process. I guess if you're a consultant, you know that generally things don't go 40 hours a week on one thing.

So it was extended out probably about six months or so. I'm not sure if I can discuss the exact details about the price part. We certainly got it. It wasn't what you'd expect. We certainly did quite a reasonable deal out of it.

In terms of this, I believe we're looking for future as a subscription model. Just keep that price down low for a lot of the different councils. Especially, we've got a lot of smaller councils. They can't really afford that much, but we really want to get that out there to them.

So we're kind of still in that exploratory stage. But yeah, again, we have done a lot of demonstrations with the community and got a lot of feedback from there. But yeah, always looking for more, to be honest.