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Housing Estate Case Studies

ChioCS

Advertiser
Moderator
A Housing Estate can be a closely knitted private residential community or a large open public estate. We will look at the various needs and the implementation.

Today, a conventional notice board, whether in a private compound or public spaces, serve to notify the target residences of various events and issues through prints and posters. It is a localise and direct marketing effort to catch their attention, the key is that there is a strong push factor to deliver essential information that the immediate residents in the vicinity needs to know about the current issues that are affecting them.

A electronic Noticeboard can provide that as well as comes with a range of benefits, example.

1. Allows residential and public participation
2. A source of revenue from Advertisers
3. Shared access to each other Noticeboard
4. Easier to create and faster access to updates

From the cost and savings perspective, though a conventional board may appears cheaper to install and implement, there's a much greater cost to maintain (prints and posters) and yields no revenue in return. Whereas a electronic notice board not only provides a active source of revenue it also promotes neighboursliness through participation and exchanges. For ChioCS Noticeboard, it is a free to use software that is easily available to the public. This allows for greater and speedy participation to the residents as well as your paying customers.

So, in this case study, we look at the some of the requirements and it's implementation.

<h4>Residents Participation & Exchanges</h4>
1. Buy sell second hand items
2. Sale and rental of properties
3. Tuition and Baby sitting
4. Renovation works in progress
5. Feedback, suggestion and Information Sharing
6. Events and promotions
7. General announcements

<h4>Source of Revenue</h4>
1. Public service providers. Housing Agent, contractors etc...
2. Resident classified Ads
3. Localise services
4. Others Events and Promotions
<hr>

<h3>Implementation</h3>

For the implementation on the technical details, take a look at <a href="http://www.chiocs.net/shopping-complex-case-studies">A Shopping Complex Case Studies</a>, to familarise you with all the terms used here.

To start, the first thing is to identify who are your subscribers, and who are the owners. Bear in mind, they are different in their implementation. That is, your subscribers will become the host group, their pages will be active all the time while the owners, together with the owners' subscribers will have to take it's turn to be scheduled.

<h4>Flexibility</h4>
Classification of who is in the Host group and those in the Guest group (owners) is arbitrary. That is, an advertiser can be one or the other or both, same applies to residents and paying public.

<h4>Screens Partitioning</h4>

Asumming you have 2 screens, a horizontal touch screen and a bigger vertical screen for display only. After you have decided upon the configuration of the screens, you may need to inform your subscribers and owners about the screens size and partitioning.

To keep it simple and flexible, you have almost the full touch screen for owners except for the small columns of owners "icon". And you dedicate the big vertical screen only as one big display and config them for all (Both Host & Guest). This means, if the owners are not using that space, the host advertisers takes control of that display. Otherwise it takes a back seat to let the scheduled owner to display first while it queue up.

Note: An advertisers or owners who had a large display window, can choose to use it for display in full or can subdivide it to display video and graphic or can have different timeslots to change.

<h4>Sorting Out</h4>
Your primary task now is to identify who needs what? And segregate them into different groups. Let's take a look at some of these examples.
<a href="http://www.chiocs.net/images/estate1.png"><img src="http://www.chiocs.net/images/estate1.png" width="20%" align="right" /></a>
<u>Minutes of residential committee meetings</u>
These are basically documents, pages of it, both current and history. You don't need a big display neither do you need to display it all the time. What is needed is a timeslot to display the most current and the option for the interested resident to interactively pick it up to browse. So you group it under owners.

<a href="http://www.chiocs.net/images/estate2.png"><img src="http://www.chiocs.net/images/estate2.png" width="20%" align="left" /></a>
<u>Announcement & Facilities</u>
In a private housing estate, there are numerous announcements to make, for example renovation works, outages of certain facility, local news you like residents to take note etc... For this, we probably needs the big screen for more important and urgent announcement and the smaller touch screen for interactive selection and for display of less important stuff. Let's put this under facilities to include bookings, estate regulation and such. We will group this under owners.

<a href="http://www.chiocs.net/images/estate3.png"><img src="http://www.chiocs.net/images/estate3.png" width="20%" align="right" /></a>

<u>Agents and Contractors</u>
As a housing estate, there are housing agents and contractors that are keen to advertise their services at your noticeboard, especially those focusing their services in and around your estate. Depends on their scale and needs, you may further segregate them out as individual or various collective units for both interactive session and display only Advert.

For example if no particular individual is interested in having own a schedule page due to their limited information or budget, you can setup an "owner" for agents and another for contractors and have these individuals setup as branches or clients to these 2 owners. In this case, when the owner is on schedule, their subscribers pages would be displayed or displayed as an icon for interactive access.

If an agent or contractor has the resource and have many pages for their product range, you could setup them up as an individual owner and leave him to manage his own pages.

For those that wants their pages to be actively displayed, you can set them up as your subscribers that is, as part of the Host group.

<a href="http://www.chiocs.net/images/estate4.png"><img src="http://www.chiocs.net/images/estate4.png" width="20%" align="right" /></a>
<u>Residents</u>
Similarly, this is a diverse group of people which may from time to time demands your services to display their needs. So depending on their wants, you probably handle it there and then how to group them.

As in the case of agents and contractors, you can setup a generic owner to handle the miscellaneous demands for Ads space. This group would consist of adhoc services or request for services, can be anything from lost and found to tuition to temporary baby sitting etc...

For resident that have a constant demand, you may set them up as a owner where they are free to handle their pages and subscribers.

<u>Feedback, Suggestion and Information Sharing</u>

Feedback, suggestions and sharing of information should be made part and parcel of your services, afterall those residents that deals with a particular agent or contractor can subscribe as an anonymous or client and comment about their services. Some other resident may like to share out what they think that benefits the local residenences.

<u>Your Subscribers (Host Group)</u>

Your subscribers can be your advertisers, your own Ads or urgent announcement etc... These are read and stay permanently in schedule. In this configuration, it uses the second big vertical screen but will be scheduled after the owners.

Note: If there are needs you can add as many screens as you like for any type of display. And if any display is configure for "Host", your subscribers will have exclusively right to it.

<h4>Time Slicing and Sharing</h4>

The time slice for display by each individual owner is taken from the owner's ntb project file. In this particular file, it can contains videos, windows and others. The owner's time allowed to display is the aggregate or the longest seen.

When the owner's page is in schedule, the owner's subscribers are scheduled for display at the same time. When the owner's time elapse, the subscribers displays will be stopped and remove together with the owner.

<h4>Networking</h4>
If you many noticeboards within a neighbourhood or in other estate, you can network them together to view each other information.
 
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