#codeacross

[techzans-blog]

The brigade is a go

Saturday, February 22: The first meeting of OpenSATX. CodeAcross San Antonio version 1.0. A pizza-fueled idea fest.

Whatever you want to call it, remember it.

It brought hackers and thinkers together to dream big about the future of San Antonio.

A census of open data available in the city came together in just a few hours. The survey is one of the most complete in the nation.

And ideas started to form.

The big ideas

Six big ideas for future projects were dreamed up by hackers, designers, researchers and city officials. The issues this brigade wants to tackle are some of the most pressing:

How can the city best notify residents of emergency conditions, like water storage levels, burn bans, power outages, road closures and more?

Could a central dashboard better get the details out?

What questions do residents ask most of the city?

Could a simple, clean FAQ portal help them get that info more easily — and reduce the burden on city staff?

All of the inspiring ideas are captured here.

Deep discussions

The conversations between the City of San Antonio IT staff and citizen were deep and serious. Questions about data sets, internal software, the city’s mission and its processes were answered and dissected.

In this age, why do we make it so hard for citizens to interact with their government? #CodeAcross #codeforamerica #OpenSATX

— Rebecca Reser (@rebeccareser)

February 22, 2014

The group brainstormed ideas for improvement, and some offered their time and skills to help the city tackle projects.

We’re pumped up

CodeAcross was a big opportunity for our fellowship team to sync up with the community and start tackling problems together. We were so humbled to see people from all walks of life come together to make their community a better and more open place. 

#opensatx is a wrap: fifty participants, six ideas for projects, one new Brigade. It’s gonna be a big year for them! #CodeAcross

— Catherine Bracy (@cbracy)

February 22, 2014

We’re excited to see what the future holds for the OpenSATX brigade. It’s looking pretty bright.

- David

Photos courtesy Kara Gomez and Joseph Lopez.

[betanyc]

#CodeAcrossNYC 2014 wrap up

BetaNYC's 1st class photo by Daniel Wilson. 

What an amazing weekend! On friday, TechPresident wrote about digital engagement starting to be the new normal in NY City Council and City Hall. Just one day later, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Council member Ben Kallos, Council member Mark Levine, five representatives from Community Boards, NYC DoITT, and NYC 311 joined one hundred of NYC's civic hacker community to make NYC's open data useful.

#CodeAcrossNYC 2014 was a two day prototype-athon taking NYC’s open government data and making it useful for NY City Council, their staff, and NYC’s Community Boards. In partnership with the Manhattan Borough President’s office, several City Council members and Community Boards, now is the time to make NYC's open data useful for all. This was our second #CodeAcrossNYC.

Our desired outcomes for Code Across NYC 2014 were:

Create tools that help city council members and community boards understand the City’s open data.

Prototype tools and dashboards for NY City Council and their staff.

Prototype tools and dashboards for NYC Community Boards.

Expose NYC’s civic hacker community to City Council Members, Council Staff, Community Board Members, and NYPD Precinct Community Councils.

With this in mind, about 20 projects were created, and these were the 12 projects that were judged.

2Gather: Transportation Help shape your scheduling and meeting needs as well as other's using active MTA/NYCOpen Data. Get to your meetings and activities on time, relieve transport capacity issues, meet people safely on time.

Choose-A-High-School NYC: Every year 80,000 middle-school students and their families choose a high school to attend. This is an application to help students find schools based on their life and experience goals, public transportation commute time, and school curriculum offerings.

City Visualization: The community board can use the map to understand and create disaster resiliency plans. And strategize about community resources.

Emrals: 

With City budgets getting pinched, municipalities have fewer resources to respond to concerns quickly. Emrals.com makes it possible for people to use their smartphones to address issues such as trash and icy sidewalks quickly and easily. With our site, you can report a problem, verify a problem or fix a problem. For instance, your elderly neighbor is afraid to leave the building due to the ice and snow covering the sidewalk.

You report the problem to Emrals using your smart phone and take a picture of the sidewalk. Your location is automatically entered via GIS. Other people can then verify that the reported issue does exist. A verifier or another good citizen can then fix the problem, showing work and results using their smart phone, and earn Emrals, a civic cryptocurrency, for helping the community.

Emrals makes it easy to be Good for the Hood.

noisyNYC: When decided where to move to in NYC I thought it would be great to visualize which areas in NYC have the most noise complaints. The project has evolved to visualizing all sorts of data from the 311 data set along with the ability to accept user data.

NYC Parks N Rec: We are building a web app that helps people find parks and facilities in NYC. The goal is to promote health and wellness in the community and encourage exploration of recreational activities and the outdoors

Post to 311 NYC (a.k.a. P.2.311 NYC): P.2.311 NYC is a bootleg, completely unsupported open311 API layer built on top of the existing NYC 311 complaint form. This API makes it easy to embed context-relevant NYC 311 complaint forms on your own web site or in mobile apps. May also include a very crude true "real-time" stream of requests or the ability to add metadata like pics/audio/video to requests.

Property Tax Explorer Map: A web map to explore property data (amount paid, property value, tax rate) across NYC.

Relief Insight Marketplace Info: We are a group of volunteers interested in promoting disaster resilience. Our project tonight is to communicate and design our open disaster resilience marketplace. We are an open data source.

Tammany: Tammany is a constituent services management tool for organizations, elected officials, community boards and agencies. Our tool allows caseworkers to easily handle cases through the issue life cycle by creating a case form, tracking progress, and sending automatic updates to constituents. Our tool enables collaboration within offices—a newsfeed allows caseworkers to update progress and notes. Tammany generates issue analytics allowing government offices to identify trends and plan progressively.

Trends: Community Board Email App: This tool will inform New York City Community Boards and residents about local issues. Boards will have new access to information that will enable them to set agenda based on data. Board members and residents will receive an e-mail summary and snapshots of local recent 311 complaints.

VoxyVote: Power up your civics journey! Take quizzes, watch videos & play games to earn points, badges, bragging rights & more! 

For our first time, we handed out six awards. In a novel attempt of 360° community engagement, attendants voted for their favorite projects. In general, voting went well and swiftly AND we had one tie.

Best Overall Civic App - Property Tax Explorer & Tammany

Best User Experience - Choose a High School NYC

Most Creative Use of Open Data - NYC Parks N Rec

Best Citizen Engagement App - Emrals

Best Visualization of NYC Open Data - City Visualizations

Best City Council/Community Board App - Trends: Community Board Email App

Thank you event sponsors:

Ontodia / Pediacities 

Vizalytics

NYU Incubator, Varick St. 

Smoretgage

Code for America / Esri & Microsoft

Socrata

For the next month, we're going to focus on project development as we develop a series of BetaTalks and full scale membership program. Please join us on Meetup.com for our upcoming hacknights and our first #CivicFridays.

Lastly, #CodeAcrossNYC 2014 wouldn't have been possible without the generous nature of an amazing group of volunteers: Jessica, Terrance, Aileen, Ariel, Chris, Doneliza, Joe, Daniel, Freddie, Gunnar, Joel, Mikael, Nathan, Yasi, Charlene, Kat, Sekai, Theodore, Alex, Tricia, Paul, Jennifer, Patrick, Sean, Emily, Trae, Vietnhi, Sami, Aykut, Daniel, Ren, Takisha.

A special thanks goes out to Jessica, Terrance, and Joel for keeping everything in order, and managing the volunteer framework. THANK YOU

[codeformia-blog]

Code for Miami: Open Data Jam Recap

by @robdotd

It isn’t very often that you get the opportunity to brainstorm about the future. You may daydream here and there about it, but do you ever really consider the potential?  How would things be different? What are the steps for us to get there?  And more importantly, who will be involved in creating it?

These were the types of questions posed at the Code for Miami’s Open Data Jam held last Saturday. An afternoon accompanied by group discussions and sticky-note adventures to help us reflect on something very important, the betterment of our community. This event was part of a much larger effort, an international CodeAcross day to unite people of all backgrounds and skillsets to engage each other in the hope of a better future. How do things get better you ask? Information is part of the answer, and our access to it as well as potential uses not currently being explored made the few hours shared together seem like just minutes.

Yenesco “Nesco” Cobain, an FIU student and one of the other attendees in the breakout group on Land Use and Real Estate had much to add. “What if someone could be alerted if they were entering a dangerous area?” he stated. Tourists could certainly use such a service, and that goes for many other areas outside of Miami as well. Another attendee suggested a heatmap of housing information emailed regularly to show new changes and trends, a useful idea for potential buyers or agents on the hunt. Permitting requirements and the need for contractor “ratings” were also brought up, a practical tool for that could be used vetting qualified and responsible builders.

Ideas blended, borrowing bits and pieces from each other, and grew into unique and actionable items. It was a humbling experience to see citizens (once called “strangers”) largely from different parts of South Florida come together for a common good. We live in these places together, shouldn’t we talk about our experiences too? Although my one regret is that I couldn’t be in two places at once, as I certainly would have enjoyed hearing the other breakout group’s suggestions. Public transportation, campaign finance, transparency in local elections, our wonderful parks, improved walkability, and the need for more “open hearts” made that afternoon time well spent. If you want to contribute to the conversation, join us on Monday night, 7pm at The Lab Miami. Everyone is welcome.

A very special thank you is in order to Ernie, Rebekah, Maggie, Xavier, Antonio, Danielle, and Chris! Thanks to PayPal for keeping us fed, The Lightbox for housing the meetup madness, The Knight Foundation for additional support, and everyone who attended for making it AWESOME!

[codeisland]

Alex Tran, Code for America's Fellowship program manager, was our trusty CodeAcross food and beverage wrangler yesterday. Thanks for all your help and support, Alex!

[opensandiego]

Code Across America Hackathon at the SDSU Visualization Center

Code Across America Hackathon: Open Data San Diego Team Report On Saturday, March 3rd,  Open San Diego got in on the Code Across America  action.  Dr. Eric Frost graciously offered up his Visualization Center at San Diego State University for our workspace and we made good use of its panoramic wall projection capabilities throughout the day. San Diego’s District Attorney (and current mayoral candidate) Bonnie Dumanis  joined us and made some introductory  remarks about the good she hopes Open Data/Gov can “do for San Diego.”  Fellow hackathoner Dave Maass posted a video and further details about Dumanis’ participation in an SD CityBeat blog post. We elected to build upon the code for Art Around, from TheArtAround.us,  and the Open Data Catalog from OpenDataPhilly.org.  We divided ourselves into two teams to get started.  I was on the Open Data SD team,  so this rest of this post only covers that portion the day’s activity. We began by evaluating the tool as deployed by OpenDataPhilly.org.  In addition to noting the need for some cosmetic customization,  we decided to alter the interface so that there would be fewer steps between identifying/selecting a data set and actually using that set.   That choice was made out of appreciation for the interface of Open San Diego’s current Flashlght resource (set up and maintained by Dave). The Open Data Catalog (ODC) and Flashlight have the same objective, and we already know that San Diegans have found Flashlight useful, so taking it as a starting point is an obvious choice. It also makes sense to begin by propagating our Open Data Catalog installation with all the information currently contained in Flashlight. Our team spent the rest of our time together working out a “next steps” list and hashing out the the best ways to go about completing those tasks. Here’s the list:

Work out a way to export the notes and links data from Flashlight (powered by a Delicious.com tag collection on) into a spreadsheet using the Delicious API.

Recruit help by giving a presentation to SDSU’s Society of Professional Journalists student group.

Work with that student group to complete and update all of the current Flashlight content.

Use the updated spreadsheet to populate the ODC installation.

Complete the cosmetic design changes to the ODC interface.

Port the web app to iOS and Android.

-Xavier

[teamlongbeach]

Hey Long Beach designers, developers, writers, makers, hackers, entrepreneurs: we would love to see you this weekend at CodeAcross, a weekend of international civic tech events.

Learn more and register here: bit.ly/codeacrosslb

Kickoff Party!

When: 5pm 'til late – Friday, February 21

Where: The Green House and ASHA Restaurant at the Broadlind Building on Broadway • 149 Linden Ave, Long Beach, CA

Join other coders, creatives and Long Beach residents to learn what CodeAcross Long Beach is all about. Enjoy live music, appetizers, and happy-hour-priced beverages as you meet other innovative and civic-minded residents.

Make-a-thon!

When: 9:30am to 6pm – Saturday, February 22

Where: WE Labs • 235 E. Broadway on the 8th Floor of the Pacific Towers building at Long Beach Blvd. (Entrance is in the parking lot.)

Come at 9:30 for breakfast, then at 10am sharp we'll organize into teams to work on innovative projects that will benefit Long Beach. You don't need to be a programmer to help — there will be many opportunities to participate, learn, and build together!

[otpglobal]

#CodeForAmerica -- http://www.codeforamerica.org/about/

Can government be run like the Internet, permissionless and open? Coder and activist Jennifer Pahlka believes it can -- and that apps, built quickly and cheaply, are a powerful new way to connect citizens to their governments -- and their neighbors.

#CodeAcross

[a-tale-of-two-islands]

Capitol building

Rhode Island(left)   |   Puerto Rico(right)

[codeforamerica]

IT for Politicos: Jeffrey Johnson - Open Source for Local Government

Watch and listen to Jeff present open source software to a local audience including members of his local government. Be like Jeff.

[kevincurry]

[codeforbtv]

Photos from CodeAcross BTV. Thanks to all of the app presenters, event partners, Catherine Collins (keynote) and Lauren-Glenn Davitian (MC). Photos: Morgan Laurie-Day and Bradley Holt

[betanyc]

Code Across NYC 2014 is next weekend!

Join us on 22 Feb for #CodeAcrossNYC 2014. This is a two day prototype-athon taking NYC’s open government data and making it useful for NY City Council, their staff, and NYC’s Community Boards. In partnership with the Manhattan Borough President’s office, several City Council members and Community Boards, now is the time to make NYC's open data useful for all.

Since 2009, NYC’s government has challenged communities to use thousands of its datasets. With the signing of the City’s transformative open data law in 2012, these datasets have been pouring out of NYC agencies. Painfully, City Council members AND local Community Boards who NEED this data find it difficult to comprehend.

Cue NYC’s civic hackers - developers, designers, mapmakers, data wranglers, urban planners, and content editors!

Date: 22 & 23 Feb 2014

Register at http://bit.ly/CodeAcrossNYC2014

[spaceagepress]

#MiamiAnswers won the #CodeAcross award for best teamwork, and I won for best mentor!! What an incredible day! Thanks to everybody for making #iHackedMiami such a success.

[codeisland]

CodeAcross Rhode Island

We are excited to be hosting Rhode Island's Code for America Brigade kickoff as part of the nationwide #CodeAcross weekend this Saturday, February 22 in the Rhode Island State House rotunda.

There are a limited number of tickets available. RSVP's close Friday at noon. bit.ly/1aWdPrL

We need everybody, not just coders: people that know about the community and the issues it faces, folks in government, artists that can make things gorgeous and usable, and those that can create elegant online solutions.

We’ll meet each other and discuss what's going on in Rhode Island and areas of opportunity that technology can help address. The output of our discussion will be a more concrete list of projects and ideas (and perhaps wireframes/designs) that the Brigade can tackle at future meetings. 

[opensandiego]

Setting up ArtAround in San Diego

It's been nearly a month since we hosted our Code Across America event at SDSU's Viz Center, and I'm just now getting around to writing about it, and particularly, the excellent work done by the team who worked on the ArtAround App.

Overall the event was a great success. We got a great mix of developers, designers, and simply curious citizens to spend a beautiful Saturday inside talking about how to make San Diego better. We also got a visit from Bonnie Dumanis, our district attorney and mayoral candidate. Bonnie shared her thoughts on the importance of open government with the group, but spent most of her time listening in and learning from other participants. I also want to publicly thank her for donating $250 to Open San Diego. I'm proud that everything we've done so far is the result of 100% pure volunteerism, but Bonnie's donation is going to help us cover the expenses of becoming a real non-profit.

But enough about the event. Dave Maass already wrote a blog post about the it at San Diego CityBeat, and Xavier Leonard has already written a recap of the work put into setting up Azavea's excellent Open Data Catalog here in San Diego. This post is about our plans to set up a sustainable version of ArtAround here in San Diego.

ArtAround is a web and mobile-based application designed to create a "comprehensive, living map of all public [art] in DC." Notably, it's a public-private partnership between the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities and the Washington DC Economic Partnership. The software that powers the app is open-source, so we installed it on an EC2 server the night before the event and the ArtAround team used the event to discuss how to make it work in San Diego.

They immediately noticed that it was built based on the concept of DC's "wards" rather than what we just call "neighborhoods." Not a big deal. It wouldn't be too difficult to swap DC's wards out for San Diego's neighborhoods and even include neighborhoods in Tijuana, all the way down to Puerto Nuevo.

Beyond that, the team discussed what it would take to make the app acutally work. That is, can we set it up, keep it running, fill it with useful data, get people to use it, and support it? What would we need? We were particularly lucky to have Kinsee Morlan in attendance, who, as CityBeat's arts editor, was able to point out a number of existing resources of data that we could include in the app. Here's what the team came up with:

Task: Deploy the service. Update the look of the site. Deploy it and the iPhone and Android apps. NEED: Rails coder, web artist, iOS coder, Android coder.

Task: Gather existing data and put it into the app as a starter set of data. NEED: Web-friendly data volunteers with some art knowledge.

Task: Write the “about this” and FAQ sections. NEED: Copy writer and/or editor.

Task: Develop a PR campaign to get the app in front of people both in San Diego and tourists. Bring in Balboa Park, SD CVB, ArtWalk, South Park business association, universities. NEED: Public Relations and Marketing volunteer, and some represenative of the app.

Create a sticker or sign to add to public art, put it at the airport. NEED: Graphic artist volunteer.

Launch event/party/tour? NEED: event planning volunteer, some funding.

Ongoing: Ask groups like Urban Art Trail to contribute lists of their artwork. NEED: Point-of-contact coordinator.

Ongoing: Manage the data and keep track of flagged items. NEED: Data quality team volunteers and community manager.

(you can see more of the team's notes in this Google Doc)

As you can see, it's a lot of work. One thing that the list doesn't explicitly mention, but hints at, is the need for a leader. This is why I think it's notable that ArtAround is the work of two groups already working to make DC better. For this to work in San Diego, we'll need someone to own the project and drive it forward. We proved that there are San Diegans willing to volunteer to support it, but we still need someone to drive the project. If you think you're that person, let me know at jed@opensandiego.org.

I'm usually skeptical about the "let's build an app!" approach to open government, but this exercise made me think twice. It was really useful because it showed how a piece of useful software can bring together various groups from the city – designers, coders, community managers, the media, and civic-minded citizens – to create a public good.

My usual grumble about building apps is that it's easy to deploy a quick app, but very difficult to keep it alive. I don't want people to believe that simply deploying an app is a solution per se. Rather, it's just the beginning of much longer project. The great thing about apps, however, is that they're great proofs of concept that we can use to start deeper conversations about how to make things better.

So, the conversation continues… Watch this space for updates on ArtAround San Diego as we proceed! And again, if you want to volunteer on this project, write me at jed@opensandiego.org.

[instashinobi]

#CodeAcross 2016 in #SanDiego. #codeforamerica brigade #opensandiego hosted its Open Data Day #hackathon at Origin Code Academy. #opendata #opendataday (at Origin Code Academy)