#codeformiami

[olddotd]

I make an appearance too! Keep your 👀 peeled for more http://CUTGroup.miami/ peeps.

[usedcarsmiami]

Tweeted

If you feel like supporting @virgintrainsMIA legacy and her family, please consider a contribution to 'Alejandra Agredo - Miami Riders Alliance ' - https://t.co/6Bv6sOCwKS via @gofundme #MiamiTech #CodeForMiami @venturecafeMIA

— Liz (@InnovateLiz) December 4, 2019

[hackersofmiami-blog]

"We try to integrate technology with being a good Miamian. Code for Miami assembles volunteer developers, designers, and citizens for regular meetups. We work with counties and non profits to build amazing things.

One of our most recent projects was TextMyBusMIA. It's a text messaging wrapper that we've built around Miami Dade transit data. Folks that don’t have an Android or iPhone can actually text with a bus stop ID to receive information of when the next bus is coming.

We're trying to help build the Miami developer eco system while motivating each other to be good citizens."

- -  Ernie Hsiung

Ernie Hsiung and Rebekah Monson launched Code for Miami, a local civic hacking brigade affiliated with Code for America. Ernie is a San Francisco native and has worked in Silicon Valley for approximately 9 years at various firms including Yahoo! and Ning. He relocated to Miami approximately 3 years ago and has made great strides to helping advance Miami developers.

Ernie also runs a meetup group called the Front End Developers of Miami. It's a regular meetup group that discusses topics related to web development and front-end engineering.

When asked what makes Miami unique, Ernie replied:

"Miami has an entrepreneurial spirit unlike other cities I've worked in. It spans all social classes: the rich, the working class, and those scrapping it. Playing it safe is not normal here."

- -  Ernie

Ernie's Words of Wisdom:

Jump in and make mistakes

Don't make things ugly, make them fail. You can keep iterating until it works.

Learn how to code. You don’t need to be a programmer to know how to code.

Ernie Hsiung  | Code for Miami

- - Click here to read more stories highlighting the Hackers of Miami - -

[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!

[codeforftl]

#HackForChange hits Florida

What do you get when some of South Florida's best and brightest are brought together and asked to "hack" for change? Well, if you were lucky enough to take part at one of the 106 locations across the United States hosting local National Day of Civic Hacking events, you just might have witnessed history.

[photo via @LienT)

Designed to spur collaboration in communities using technology, open data, and the support of volunteers and government agencies alike, these (sometimes multi-day) hackathons ask anyone in the community to team up, contribute their skills, and learn something new about the places they live. The following is a brief recap of my local NDoCH experience at The LAB Miami. 

On Saturday morning, Code for Miami's Rebekah Monson, along with the City Manager of Miami Daniel J. Alfonso and Florida's Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, announced to the hackers, designers, and techies that filled the LAB Miami's main room the importance of our day ahead. "Imagine if we could turn loose upon the people of Florida an understanding of how this all works," referencing the $80 billion dollar budget and the complexity of navigating government agencies and services. "What if they had access to that information, and understood it, and could create value for them, in their work." He also reflected on Florida's history of transparency reporting, "We've made a lot of data available, and we've gone from a D, to a A-, to an A, but what if people could actually use the data," which led to cheers in the audience. Closing his remarks, he insisted our actions are taking Florida "in a whole new path."

CFO@JeffAtwater kicks off #hackforchange w @CodeForMiami @CodeforFTL @CodeForOrlando @CodeForTampaBay @codeforamerica pic.twitter.com/yzYOltDNYt

— Ashley Carr (@FloridAshley)

June 6, 2015

The day resulted in websites, mobile apps, visualizations, and hardware hacks to address five different challenge areas: Disaster Preparedness and Relief, Climate Change, Transportation, Open Data (Working Group), and for a very first in Florida's history, Vendor Payment Data from the last six years was made available for download (Special thanks to Jeff Atwater, C.F.O and his team).

Below are the pictures of the groups presenting their projects, many made in less than five hours, with many first time hackathon participants included. This was a vital step in recognizing the state-wide development of civic hacking brigades and to support those working towards better data access, usability, and transparency in their community. I was honored to take part and look forward to the projects, happy hacking Floridians! If you want to relive the opening remarks, they can be found here [starts at 1:05:49].

[View the story "#HackForChange hits Florida - NDoCH, Code for Miami" on Storify]

Written by Rob Davis of Code for Fort Lauderdale.

[spaceagepress]

Super impressed by the projects at #CodeForMiami! Here's a #WIP module to track buses and warn others if they're late. #Miami #wynwood #tech (at LAB Miami)

[codeformia-blog]

Code for Miami - Weekly Update Feb 17 2014

This week was a great meeting! We had a huge turnout and the pizza flew out of the box. But we always think outside the box, right? This week was particularly exciting as this Saturday we are hosting the Miami Open Data Jam! This an event for everyone, coders and non-coders, to share their ideas on how we can make Open Data a standard in Miami-Dade County. Sign up and share your ideas with us!

We introduced some new Core Members of the Code for Miami Team. Danielle Ungermann is the new Community Organizer, keeping track of members and important dates as well as spreading the word of Code for Miami. Maggie Diaz-Vera will be our Storyteller, updating social networks and the Code for Miami blog with important/useful information and weekly updates. Xavier Hayeck and Antonio Llanos will act as the Delivery Leads. Xavier and Antonio will be the people to go to if you want to be assigned to or learn more about the projects going on at Code for Miami.

We had a special guest join us for last night's meeting. Waldo Jaquith from the U.S. Open Data Institute and creator of The State Decoded happened to be in Miami for a conference and decided to join us to see what we are doing to make Miami's data more transparent. We want to thank him very much for sharing his ideas on how we can use the Local Business Tax Data, the XML file we've created from the Municode information, and general ideas on getting Miami-Dade's data to be more open.

Some projects that are still in development are the Open 311 application, the Text My Bus App is currently in the testing stage, and we have been given a new project to develop in Rep Miami. Rep Miami is an application started by Patrick that will be developed for citizens to be able to easily get into contact with their local representatives.

A special thank to Wyncode as well as they filmed our meeting last night to be featured in a video highlighting the growth of technology in Miami and Wynwood and the launch of their new code school.

It looks like we will be amounting to some great things, and we thank you for contributing however you can. And as always we thank our fearless leaders, Rebekah and Ernie. With all the work we are doing, 2014 can certainly become the year for Open Data in Miami-Dade County! With that being said, come out to Open Data Jam for our Brainstorming session and share with all your friends who want to make a difference! Hope to see you all next week.

[rebekahmonson]

So proud to have played some small part in getting this amazing opportunity to our county.

[codeformia-blog]

Code for Miami - March 31st Meeting

Every week we manage to get some bright and caring individuals together to work and brainstorm projects to help our community. This meeting, marking the end of the first quarter shows we done a lot of work but there is still so much we can do.

RepMiami is currently in testing stages to see if there are any bugs. But for the most part is complete. Great work, Miguel!

We are currently waiting for some backside development from the county for the Open 311 application. In the meantime, Greg Bloom is currently working on an Open 211 initiative with openreferral.org. This is to direct people to non-government businesses for any services they may require. They are working with Switchboard Miami, Miami's current 211 provider, on how to best make this data open and searchable.

There has been a lot of local and media interest for the bicycle tracking app, 'Dude, Where's My Bike.' We're hoping to get this further into development in the coming weeks.

We had a visit this week from Jase Wilson, brigade captain of Code for Kansas City. Also with us was Rob Davis, brigade captain of Code for Ft. Lauderdale. It's always great to get together and discuss how throughout the country our Code for America brigades are working towards open government.

Heyyyy! @luminopolis is here from #codeforkc tonight! @codeforamerica ❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/LBz8aWmBVz

— Code For Miami (@CodeForMiami) April 1, 2014

Rob is currently working on the Florida Legislation Tracker which will work towards tracking and identifying the latest bills and legislation passed by Florida Lawmakers. Once it is completed, it will help citizens understand and track legislation with issues they find important.

Remember the next two weeks are going to be a little different than our usual meetings. Monday, April 7 our own Adrian Cardenas will present "Learning the Command Line," a beginners talk for folks that want to understand more about the interfaces behind Unix/Unix-like systems and command line utilities. April 14th we will be user testing the text my bus app. There will be two separate testing groups at Dadeland South Station and Government Center Metro Rail Station.

As always, thanks for all the work everyone puts into making our community better. Let's get coding!

[codeformia-blog]

Code for Miami Meeting - March 24 Notes

This week was a great meeting and it looks like we are getting close to the finishing steps on some of our great projects. We had a full house tonight which was absolutely wonderful. Here is the news on some of our key projects and where we currently stand.

The Local Business Data Tax Set has been organized thanks to Juan and Emily. Mike Sarsati from Miami Dade County has shown the progress to the City of Miami business tax collector and they were rather impressed by the amount of work in such a short amount of time! Hopefully now they will understand the benefit to making information open! ;D

The new goal with this project is to create a visual map to locate paid vs unpaid taxes by zip code. Let us know if this is something you want to work on!

For Open311, apparently our work was so exceptional, that the code for the main Open311 app is going to be updated to be a little more future-proof for any information that may be submitted later. So while there may be some initial downtime for those improvements, it's great to know that we are moving forward.

TextMyBus testing is going to be on April 14 during our meeting. 2 groups will meet at Government Center and Dadeland South Station and test the sticker design that has been created. Ben Manley has also made a premilnary promotional video for the TextMyBus app. You can download it on this thread. 

We are currently working on creating content for MiamiWiki. Maggie has drafted a stock letter to send to different local interest groups reaching out about local wiki and how they can contribute. Jeremy Roth stopped by with an idea of making a GPS-based Walking App of Miami that will pull information from MiamiWiki to educate locals and tourists of the geographical area they are in. We are currently looking to add historical content about Miami. As well, feel free to add information about your favorite places and what gives Miami it's flavor. Anyone can add to it!

So as you can see, we are getting a lot of things moving and it's thanks to all of our efforts. The more people that contribute, the more we can do! As some of these projects are in their finishing stages, we can now focus our efforts on new projects that could stem from ideas shared during our Open Data Jam.

[codeformia-blog]

What is Open Data and What Can I Do to Make a Difference?

Tomorrow, we will be our hosting our first, Open Data Jam at The Light Box. This is really exciting because this is our chance to show local officials we are serious about data transparency in our government.

Open Data is the idea that government (local, national, or international) should allow individuals access to certain types of data. If this information was open, citizens would be able to better understand what is going on and how they can contribute. 

An example of how open data helps us is the National Weather Service. Because they distribute this information, developers can make programs with 10-day forecasts based on your location and even simple apps like seeing if it will rain today. This information has helped launch a variety of business models from The Weather Channel to Weather Bug. 

This kind of information is vital for citizens to create a productive environment. And the more information we have access to, the better our community can run and develop. There are many different data sets we hope will become available such as Election Results, Crime Statistics, Property Data, Information for Hunting and Fishing and so much more.

We invite you to brainstorm with us on what kind of information we need and we can use this data to help our community become more secure and more efficient. Remember, no idea is too small! We hope to see you tomorrow at the Open Data Jam!

[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.