For the moment being, as there isn’t a community nor a conversation yet, we prefer keeping things simple. If you have something to say, you can just add a comment on every page and post, we’ll be watching them and try to answer as fast as possible.

Below these lines we are going to describe in a more detalied way the features that have been developed or improved:

Change of plattform

Version 2.0 of Whatif(w) has been rewritten from scratch to work as a theme for WordPress, the popular, open source Content Management System that is usually used to build advanced blogs and dynamic websites of any kind.
this strategic move aims at making the installation process easier (just like any other WordPress theme), increasing the possibilities of customization and allowing its modular development through the future addition of plugins.

Changes on design and interface behaviour

The input of data during the publishing process of an entry on the website is now much more agile, allowing the user to move back and forth quickly, with an intuitive sliding visual effect, in order to modify or correct any data before publishing.

In the visualization mode, entries are also loaded by groups in order to facilitate navigation without having to transfer too much information over the net at a time.

Using rags for content management

Taking advantage of WordPress’ own features, now the tags attached to any entry are connected to the database, allowing them to link to a view where all similar tagged items are displayed. This allows the user to filter the content by areas of interest, and makes the analysis of the results of a participative process much more straightforward.

Enhanced keyword cloud, now based on actual WP tags

The former keyword cloud is now a more useful tag cloud, based on WP tags rather than words taken from the content of the entries as the previous version did. The size of the tags changes dynamically depending on the number of entries tagged with each one of them, thus helping to show in a very visual and intuitive way the topics that are generating more interest in a positive (ideas, proposals) or a negative (complaints, problems) way.

Added Facebook, Twitter and Tuenti sharing buttons

In order to help spreading the project itself and every entry on its own, and the creation of distributed conversations aside the website itself —something crucial in every participative process—, we have included an option to publish any entry separately to the most usual social networks.

Added an entry voting system

A button placed over every entry now allows the user to add a +1 like vote, thus giving a simple way of measuring the reach and support that entry is achieving. The voting system, together with the already mentioned ability to share entries on social networks, encourages the user to see him- and hersef as upholder and publicist of his/her own ideas, helping them spread and evolve into projects.

Changes on icons to make them more informative

The icons that filter the categories now show in a graphical way whether they are selected or not, as well as the number of entries available under each category.

Linking entries to the map

All entries are now linked from their text view to their exact position on the map, allowing the connection of both views in a fast, intuitive way.

User registration and profiles

Another key change in this version is the addition of user profiles. The sign-up process is really fast (takes just a few seconds) and allows connecting entries with their authors. That way any participant can access to the list of his published entries, check the votes they have got so far and share or edit them.
The user profile is editable and can show personal information at will, helping this way the users to contact each other and start conversations and projects around the existing ideas.
Once the register is completed, the user can link his/her account to Facebook Connect or Twitter to make login even easier.

Conclusion

All changes mentioned above —and some minor ones we may have forgotten here— aim at the same goal: making Whatif(w) easier to use and improving its potential for generating interaction through socialization of its contents.

With the web application hitting an intense phase of final polish, version 2.0 beta is already having a test run at Whatif Cáceres and Whatif Alicante. We intend to be publishing soon the official site for the Whatif project, containing general information about the tool, instructions and the download links to the Whatif(w) WordPress theme itself.

After the first presentation of the What If…? Cities exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art of Copenhage in 2009, the project kept on extending to other cities under the form of courses and workshops with various formats, for which we developed what we defined as a collective and interactive tool for visualizing the opinions of citizens and their proposals towards an alternative urban future: Whatif.

That first version of the web tool, applied to workshops like the ones that took place at Cáceres and Alicante, was capable of publishing in an easy way short geo-located messages expressing suggestions or problems found by the local citizens in the urban environment. During those workshops the application was tested and proposals, usability problems and improvement opportunities were collected thanks to the comments of the participants.

After that first use cycle, and given the results, we decided to add to the application many of the collected suggestions, specially the ones aimed at facilitating readability and revision of the loaded entries and at achieving a better integration with other social networks and services around the Internet.

Finally, after some months of development, we are very pleased to announce the forthcoming publication, on may, of the new Whatif 2.0 version, that will have its own official site including the necessary documentation, a space for the community, a blog for news and articles, a list of projects built upon Whatif, and as the most important novelty, the application itself for download.

As a part of our interest in open culture and following our progressive approach to open source based business models, version 2.0 will be offered to the public under an open license, for which we are right now studying to the detail licenses like the GNU GPL (General Public License) and compatible ones, which would allow the final user to:

• Download, install and use it freely for their own projects.
• Study how it’s been made and modify it to adapt it to heir needs.
• Copy and distribute freely, under the same terms of license.
• Improve it and make those improvements public for the benefit of the community.

This will allow everyone to easily install the application, adapt it and use it in participatory processes at any level, from a data mapping made by a specific collective to an idea-hunting campaign over the entire network around a city or country.

As for the application itself, although its interface doesn’t seem to have changed at all, it packs lots of new functions oriented to improve usability, and its structure has been completely rewritten from scratch over a well known and widely used plattform like (WordPress), which we believe will give to Whatif an ease of use, a control and a personalization power high above the ones of the previous version.

In a coming article we will publish the first images, will show the new features added and will communicate the exact date in which Whatif 2.0 will finally be available to you. We hope this will be the first step on the construction of an open community of professionals, urban activators and citizens in general interested in the dinamization of participatory processes with the aid of digital tools and physical actions on urban space.