Michael McKelvey and Sarthak Prasad met to continue discussing how to handle projects with large numbers of metrics in the iCAP Portal.

Discussion/Decisions

• Option #1: continue showing metrics in accordion on project page
  • Pros:
    • No new effort needed
  • Cons:
    • Lots of metrics on a single page - kind of overwhelming
    • Page load could get slow
• Option #2: parent project for all pedestrian & bicycle counts with a sub-project for each counter, similar to how Solar Power on Campus is set up
  • Pros:
    • Only 1 metric per page
    • Simple solution
    • Easy to find each counter in hierarchy
  • Cons:
    • 30+ new projects - hierarchy bloat?
    • Don't see all the metrics together; have to visit each project to see its metric
• Option #3: show all metrics on a single graph
  • Pros:
    • See everything in one place
    • No new projects needed
  • Cons:
    • New feature requires additional work to implement
    • Graphing dozens of items makes it hard to differentiate them - too much data
• Things to consider:
  • What information do we want people to get from the data? Comparison of pedestrian vs bicycle? Comparison of various locations?
  • Discuss graphing long-term metrics

TODOs:

• Bring options to larger group
• Sarthak will investigate whether Eco Counters website could allow embedding of their visualizations

Agenda

• [Michael] Quick updates:
  • Project Updates now default to being promoted to front page
  • Metrics link on homepage links to Metrics w/Details listing
  • Homepage video updated to iCAP 2025 Kickoff video
  • Featured Projects on Projects page: now showing last 2 updated/edited Featured Projects (previously we showed the latest 2 by creation date, so editing a Featured Project didn't bump it back to the top). This will match the sorting on the Featured Projects listing page.
  • Bugfix: Metric annotations now allow line breaks (previously line breaks in metrics would stop all graphs on the page from loading)
  • Bugfix: Project descriptions - big images were causing "View Full Description" to look weird. Sarthak, you'd reported this bug - could you test this out and see if you can still break it?
  • Started showing all images on SSC Projects and moved the images below the map. Most projects seem to have only 1-3 images anyway. If this becomes an issue for projects with lots of images, I can look into other options.
• [Michael, Miriam] Intro to new Recommendations process
• [Sarthak, Michael] Discussion of how to handle projects with large numbers of metrics (see notes from Sarthak & Michael's discussion)

Discussion

• New Google Analytics user numbers dropped in half last year, largely due to changes in the way Google Analytics tracks users (see Google Analytics changes impact the user counts for the Portal project update)
  • Start a new metric?
  • Continue using current metric with an Annotation?
    • This was the preferred approach.
• Homepage video: the explanatory text about climate change is in the way - can we remove it?
  • No, YouTube automatically adds topical context in information panels to videos on topics prone to misinformation
  • We could upload the video to MediaSpace and use their embedder
• Intro to new Recommendations process
  • Recommendations will start being added next week
  • Do we have the process for adding Recommendations documented?
    • No documentation yet, just verbally described
    • Old Recommendations process is detailed in 2 private Word documents on the Sustainability iCAP Portal project page.
  • Decided to continue discussion at next meeting
• Discussion of how to handle projects with large numbers of metrics [DEFERRED TO FUTURE MEETING]

TODOs

• ✅ Featured Projects:
  • ✅ Stop wrapping text below image
  • ✅ Strip formatting from text
• ✅ Recommendations
  • ✅ Add iWG Team
• ✅ Project page
  • ✅ Show list of associated iCAP Teams only to logged in users
• ✅ Recommendations search page
  • ✅ Only show links for Recommendations; make the rest plain text
  • ✅ Add column for latest Recommendation Update status

Members of the Zero Waste Team analyzed the main buildings in each of the three central quads. Locations of current 3-bins were noted as well as areas where more were needed. The plan is to transition away from single flow trash and recycling bins towards a system where only 3-bins are used in main hallways. This will ensure that there are well marked bins in highly visible areas and will condense the many bins that need to be serviced by university workers into fewer overall bins. Overall this initiative will lead to improved waste management efficiency and increased recycling rates across the campus.