#cmp541

[rebekahmonson]

HHMIA: Show-and-tell with Sun Sentinel's Dana Williams and Rachel Schallom

At Hacks/Hackers Miami's Oct. 28 meetup, Sun Sentinel web designer Rachel Schallom and database editor Dana Williams walked us through their Sex Predators Unleashed project, the paper's first responsive, custom-built interactive media project. 

The project's data analysis components were extensive, cross-referencing a sex offender registry with other prison records to learn which sexual predators were released and then committed additional violent crimes. They found more than 500 sexual predators who fit this category. Williams built the final database portion of the project on the Yii framework, which was effective but later proved problematic as it is primarily used for enterprise applications.

Schallom designed the project using Bootstrap and some common jQuery plugins. Schallom's goals were to make the project both responsive and media-rich, featuring videos, photo galleries, documents and information graphics. She also chose to make the multi-part story one large, continuous scroll, arguing that spreading stories out over multiple days is a print conceit.

The team faced numerous challenges along the way. For example, the project wasn't integrated into the main site's new paywall, and it wasn't appropriate for advertising. However, the project resulted in huge changes within the judicial system — the director of the predator program was ousted and the issue will be at the forefront of the upcoming legislative session. 

[rebekahmonson]

OpenHack Miami

I spent most of our weekly hack night this week working with Susan on a Code for Miami open government survey for candidates for elected office. Despite increasing press around the country about civic hacking and the importance of accessible, useable public data, we still face an uphill battle on awareness in Miami. The survey includes five easy-to-answer questions for those seeking office along with a letter explaining what open government is and pointing to examples in cities like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, the Twin Cities, etc. I'll spend a chunk of free time this week seeking potential institutional supporters of the survey so that politicians will see that these issues are important to a broad swath of their constituents. The group will revise and edit the letter and survey collaboratively so we can send it to potential supporters next Monday.

Some other Code for Miami projects were in the works too. Miguel worked on translating the Code for Miami page into Spanish. Cristina refined scraper for the StatesDecoded initiative to get the county code of ordinances into a more usable, and search-engine friendly format, while Ernie tackled some front-end issues.

[rebekahmonson]

Hacks/Hackers Miami Intermediate MySQL Meetup

Steph Rosenblatt, a former developer from the Miami Herald and current developer at gui.de, walked us through how to do basic data analysis and web application development with MySQL at the Sept. 22 Hacks/Hackers Miami meetup.  We started with a refresher on how to structure our tables using INT, ENUM, VARCHAR, CHAR, DATE, and TIME datatypes. We then used phpMyAdmin to query, compare and join datasets. We covered commands and functions including SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, SELECT, SELECT DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY, GROUP BY and INNER JOIN.

This meetup was a small group (5-6 people) and very hands-on. Whenever I start using MySQL in earnest, I think I'll have a much better grasp on syntax and functions as a result of this run-through and Steph's initial bootcamp. Steph's presentation will be available on slideshare.

[rebekahmonson]

Code for Miami Hack Night with guest Kent Brewster

Kent Brewster, a developer at Pinterest and a civic hacker did a Google Hangout with Code for Miami on Sept. 16 about his Profiling Atherton project. Kent covered a range of topics about why he was motivated to look into the police blotter data, scraping and cleaning the data, analyzing it, hosting the project on GitHub and the consequences of his work. 

Kent noticed that Atherton, the third most-expensive ZIP Code in America near his neighborhood in Menlo Park, was posting its police blotter on a Wordpress site. Atherton's blotter is often cited for its "first-world problems," and Kent thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at trends in it. He used Wget to scrape the site, cleaned and massaged the data into a large JSON object and started querying. 

Kent's analysis showed that the Atherton police were disproportionately citing, and in many cases impounding the vehicles of, Hispanic non-resident drivers. In fact, 175 of 182 drivers cited from February to July 2013 had Hispanic names, and only two Atherton residents were cited. Shortly after Kent posted Profiling Atherton, the police stopped providing open updates of the crime blotter online. They have since transitioned to a vendor solution that is much harder to read and to scrape.

Kent's passion about his community really shone through in our discussion. He believes that the tech community can be a great contributor to the social good by analyzing and working toward better access to civic data.