The Digital Marker hosts assembled resources and materials for public presentation in a prepared framework for computer-based interaction. It’s easily adapted for collaborative publishing and local distribution around a community wireless access point.
These hosted resources are then selected and sorted into collections by subject or objective to communicate a narrative or campaign for change.
Preparation for installation of the Digital Marker to serve local public, inside or out in the wild, will require production of a protective case which can be customised to help promote it’s visibility or camouflaged to protect its existence.
The case needs to be fixed in a location within reach of a suitable power supply (POE or Solar) where public interaction using handheld computers and smartphones is safe. Mounting options may include clamping to posts fences or trees so integrated screw mounting points for walls and ceilings are included. When POE is used to deliver power and network access, the Cat5 ethernet cable will need to be secured along it’s path to the connection point, usually inside adjacent building or street level power distribution point.
The Digital Marker offers hotspot access to smartphone, tablet and laptop computer for interaction with those people in proximity on its built-in local wireless network.
The wireless network name along with all aspects of the interaction offered can be customised to suit its location and public.
Selected materials uploaded during workshops for publication are stored alongside any variety of contributions and comments collected throughout the use of the marker.
A locally connected public can then review the collections of captured, modelled and recorded media stored there, with an invitation for further interaction, exploration and learning.
If your marker is to be installed outside, its protection from the weather is essential. When a conventional mains power source is out of range, a small solar panel and energy storage system can be used to power the Digital Marker.
The Digital Marker a network publishing platform that runs on a Raspberry Pi SBC (small board computer). Selected materials are uploaded and set in a social narrative, promote activity or campaign for change.
A selection of network publishing tools are presented for adoption and configuration. WordPress is the worlds leading CMS (content management system) and is hugely customisable and adaptive. Its configuration for use in the construction of this guide features some powerful options and should work equally well on small and larger screens.
All the information in the guide alongside your media uploaded and archived, is stored on a Micro SD card which does limit the scale of the collections offered to fit within the capacity of these cards. It does mean that it’s very easy to remove the card from the case for duplication and back up to another computer.
This guide is easily transported between cloud web hosting and your Digital Marker as the backed-up WordPress file, (currently 60MB). The WordPress plug-in tools for enabling this process are included.
A back-up and update procedure is an essential part of the use of all information systems, please remember to do this or face trauma of data loss at some point!
Greater publishing ambitions would be best served by more conventional storage and web retrieval systems are they locally or cloud-hosted but are outside the scope of this initiative.