ForwardTrack Instructions

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Support
• Installation
• Use/Features
  • Tracking
  • End-user
  • Admin/developer
  • API/library
• License
• More Documentation:
  • CHANGELOG
  • Installation
  • Templating
  • Extending
  • Core API Library
  • Impact Metrics
  • ToDo
  • Useful Scripts

Overview

ForwardTrack is a new system created by Eyebeam R&D and Stamen Design designed to promote on-line activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and online petitions. It can trace email forwards, map the impact of blogs, and facilitate web-based sign-ups and social networking. Our goal is to help people understand decentralized networks and see the power of "6 degrees of separation." ForwardTrack technology helps prove that one person can make a difference.

Read more prose about ForwardTrack on its homepage: http://forwardtrack.eyebeamresearch.org/. The rest of this documentation will focus on how to install and use the tool/software.

Support

If you need tech support, please get it via the Sourceforge.net support forums:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=115464

Installation

ForwardTrack is implemented in PHP (>= v4.1.3), uses MySQL (>= v3.23) for data storage, and is expected to be used under the Apache web server (1.3 or 2.0). All of these components are free/open-source software, and extremely widely available.

Please see install.html file in this directory for installation instructions.

Use/Features

ForwardTrack is not necessarily that feature-rich, per se. In fact, it is rather focused. It embodies a specific concept, as described above, in a online campaign system with the following feature set:

• Tracking Features
  • Builds social network of registrants and referrals.
  • Geographic
  • Per-degree of separation
• End-User Features
  • Web-based campaign registration and friend referral (via email).
  • Tracks and displays overall campaign progress geographically and by degree of separation.
  • Tracks and displays each participant's impact georgraphically and by degree of separation.
  • Per-participant social networking components:
    • Shows referred friends
    • Shows which friends have registered
    • Individualized registration page, for easy linking from web sites, weblogs, email, instant messenger, etc.
  • Participants can (optionally) explore the network of registrations and referrals.
• Campaign Administrator/Developer Features
  • Easy creation/templating of new campaigns.
  • Uses popular PHP templating system, Smarty, to format HTML. Easy to modify without worrying about the code. See more documentation on templating ForwardTrack.
  • Transparently handles everything including email delivery by default
  • Tracks entire network of registrations and referrals.
  • Per-campaign analysis -- overall and per-degree of separation
  • Per-campaign data export in standard data formats for import into other email and supporter management systems.
  • Easily (hopefully) extensible. Allows for added data-gathering and metric-tracking with minimal extra development effort. See further documentation on extending ForwardTrack.
• API/Library integration
  • Fully-functional core PHP libraries for ForwardTrack-style network tracking and analysis. See further documentation on the ForwardTrack core modules.
  • As-of-yet-unimplemented REST and SOAP web service API for integration with non-PHP systems.
• Useful Administrative/Testing Scripts
  • For rebuilding/reaggragating map data.
  • For simulating user data/tree growth.

License

ForwardTrack is distributed under the GPL (see the LICENSE file in this directory), though some of its included libraries (in ft/lib/) may not be.