We're planning to set up 4 data displays in the Wikimedia Foundation office - I'm thinking at least 19" screens, maybe larger. The intent here is not to appear "hip", but to make the office environment more interesting for visitors, such as potential donors. This creates conversation pieces and memorable moments - which is important for cultivating relationships.
I'd like to request your comments on what kinds of displays we could set up. Some initial ideas:
- Real-time recent changes. This should be relatively straightforward using the IRC feeds. Most effort here will go into prettification, I think. What would be a good IRC client to show multiple channels at once?
- Show random articles. Not particularly creative, but should also be fairly easy to do using some scripting. Would be nice to show stuff from projects beyond WP.
- Show articles matching to current searches. How difficult would it be to capture search data for this?
- Show the actual search strings. I don't love this one, because Google already does this, but it might be interesting content-wise.
- Show traffic data. What would be interesting displays here? Can we show bandwidth usage in real-time?
- Show images as they are being uploaded. Do we have anything like that already? If not, how hard would it be to implement?
- Data displays of developmental indicators - e.g. Gapminder data on Internet access, literacy, etc. Is there anything like this that we could do with relatively little effort? Any volunteers to put something together?
- Geomapping of access - some visualization of the primary clusters where traffic is coming from, based on sampling. I imagine this could be quite tricky - but might be a cool long-term project for a volunteer?
- Visualization of edit patterns, similar to: http://abeautifulwww.com/2007/05/20/visualizing-the-power-struggle-in-wikipe...
Other ideas / comments?