Metro Mapper

National Day of Civic Hacking Louisville 2015

2015-07-06T15:24:00.000-04:00

Hack for Change Louisville was held as the city’s official Code for America National Day of Civic Hacking event, one of over 100 simultaneous events across the United States. The day brought together local government leaders and staff, local organizations, non-profits, businesses, visitors, and community members and was focused on civic innovation.

Full recap at Civic Data Alliance.

Over 35 people participated in this year’s event. Louisville’s Code for America brigade, the Civic Data Alliance, volunteered to organize this year’s event and partnered with Code Louisville for event hosting and promotions.

We self-organized around 8 different projects, after narrowing the field from 16 potential ones.

Project 1: Restaurant health rating app

Project 2: Add building heights to @openstreetmap Louisville

Project 3: Find and rate Medicaid-accepting doctors

Project 4: Pardis: park amenity finding native app

Needed better amenity location data from Metro Parks.

Project 5 - Interactive mapping and data site for local youth policy action

Collaboration with KY Youth Advocates: kyyouth.org

Based on: github.com/DCActionforChildren/dcaction

Project 6 - Online database of youth services

Collaboration with Metro Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods:louisvilleky.gov/government/safe-neighborhoods

Project 7 - Technology events website hub for the city

Website: Louisville.io

Project 8: Formalizing Louisville Mayor’s Open Data Policy with council ordinance

A contest was run via an online poll, with voting done by all the participants, across 3 categories:

Best Use of Data (tie): Connecting Medicaid recipients to doctors #3, Kentucky Youth Advocates #5
Biggest/Widest Impact (tie): Connecting Medicaid recipients to doctors #3, Metro Safe & Healthy Neighborhoods #6
Project with the Most Potential: Connecting Medicaid recipients to doctors #3

Social Media and Press

Courier Journal Louisville hackers code for public good

WFPL How Computer Hacking Can Improve Louisville’s Public Policy

Insider Louisville Largest-ever national convening of civic hackers set for Saturday

Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who volunteered to make this happen, to everyone who came and hacked away the day, and to our event sponsors!

See you next year!

MEETUP EVENT DETAILS

Hack for Change Louisville Recap 2014

2014-06-02T11:30:00.001-04:00

Cross posted from the YourMapper blog.

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Louisville's National Day of Civic Hacking event wrapped up this past Saturday May 31. How did it go?

Success!

The event was a huge success! The organizers, Louisville's Civic Data Alliance, would like to thank everyone who participated including Greg Fischer (Louisville Metro’s Mayor), Ted Smith (City Innovation Director), and Tim Welsh (Metro CIO).

We had 45+ people sign up and attend. We were part of over 100 cities, 124 events, and 10,000 participants across the nation.

Civic Data Alliance

The Civic Data Alliance is Louisville’s official Code for America brigade, and the organizing body for this year’s NDoCH. If you want to join us, discover projects we are working on, and join our monthly meetups, please visit our site and sign up on our forums.

The Projects

We focused on 5 projects to build and ship in just 6 hours, based on data available and interest levels. Here's a summary of each of them.

1. WFPL Curious City

We deployed the first version of WBEZ's Curious City Project, for WFPL in Louisville.

http://fast-ocean-3651.herokuapp.com

"What do you wonder about Louisville, the region or its people that you want WFPL to investigate?"

2. NC3 Neighborhood Editor

The Network Center for Community Change needed a way for locals to improve the accuracy of locations and mapping in the neighborhoods their volunteers and community members know. So we built a neighborhood explorer with links to editing features easily in Open Street Map.

mapwestlou.org

"NC3 believes that community-generated data created by neighborhood residents and advocates is a powerful tool for change. With this data we are making change together, and we need you to join the movement!

NC3 has developed this web site to help introduce people to the geography of West Louisville neighborhoods, while offering an avenue to add and share data on OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world, and it’s the perfect tool to create data for West Louisville Neighborhoods that can be updated and shared by everyone. So take a look at the neighborhoods on this site and start editing!"

3. NC3 Shareabouts

NC3 also needed a way for locals to share positive locations and memories in their neighborhoods. So we worked with them to deploy a Shareaboutsplatform.

http://shareabouts.louiewatch.com/

4. Shelter Helper - Adopt a Pet

Using the city's open data portal and Metro Animal Services pet data, we built a website where you can serach, filter, and browse the available animals to adopt, and then get driving directions texted to your phone to go pick up your sweet little pet.

Full Source Code: https://github.com/bcpower/ShelterHelper

5. Louisville Minecraft

Our most ambitious project for the day was to recreate Louisville within Minecraft, just like Denmark did! It was the only project that didn't ship (though we got it working after the event around 6pm because people stayed to help). But we got a good handle on the process and with the right data we know it can be done!

It did take us 2 hours to download/merge/clip less accurate data from Kentucky's open GIS portal, since that data was not available on the city's open data portal (which would have taken a few minutes instead).

Links we used:

Layers we needed
KY GIS data used
First tutorial used (didn't work out)
Second tutorial used (worked)
Louisville Raw Data: 1 square mile - All of city (4GB!) -
Tools: Open qGIS editor - Minecraft - CraftBukkit - Our new Github Script

Roadblocks

Our biggest roadblock, which directly affected the success of 3 of the 5 projects, was the lack of open GIS and mapping data from the city of Louisville. We had to work harder to turn to alternative, less accurate sources, and in some cases pay another company out-of-pocket for data we needed.

More Event Pictures

Info from 2014 Event Page

HACK FOR CHANGE

Hack for Change Louisville is being held as the city's formal National Day of Civic Hacking event, one of over 119 simultaneous events across the United States. The day will bring together local government leaders and staff, local organizations, businesses, visitors, and community members and is focused on civic innovation. Here's what to expect:

Software development (a hackathon event) using open public data.
Collaborative building of open data apps and services for non-profits and the community.
Discussions on open data at the city, county, and state levels.
Networking, learning, fun, and making a difference!

The initiative is a united national effort to connect citizens and government in a partnership focused on improving people’s daily lives through technology. This event will bring together techies, entrepreneurs, do-gooders, activists and others like you from across the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent tools using publicly-released data.

Civic hacking as a form of citizen engagement and volunteerism is gaining momentum reaching cities across America not those known for technology and innovation. Civic hackers are already active and contributing to the betterment of your community.

Reserve your free tickets now

THE STORY

Louisville's Code for America brigade has volunteered to organize this year's event. Called the Civic Data Allliance (CDA), we are the public's voice for open data, interested in liberating, improving, gathering, defining, and reporting on public data.

Hack for Change Louisville has these main goals:

Create a one-day environment for entrepreneurs, app developers, and programmers to create innovative apps and websites using open public data.
Identify opportunities to brainstorm, capture, design, and even deploy valuable software applications that serve the city.
Bring together local government officials, municipal employees, experts, programmers, designers, citizens and journalists to share thoughts on the City of Louisville's open data portal.
Foster communities of practice and advocacy on the role of the civic innovation, mobile communication, online information, and open data at the City of Louisville.
Discover other datasets that contain public information a the city, county, and state level that should be made public (property, transit, GIS, etc).
Create outcomes that participants will act upon after the event is over.

LOCATION

Nucleus is this year's gracious host and location sponsor. Last year Nucleus hosted the event as well, at their nearby iHub coworking space.

Enter in the parking lot off Floyd St directly across from iHub. Then walk in these doors.

The space is great and we'll have a projector, mics, speaker system for music, Wi-fi, fridge, food, power strips and more!

SCHEDULE

8am - Doors open, mingling, coffee, breakfast, setup

9am - Introductions and overview, project tracks review

9:30 - Break into self-organized groups to work on projects

12 - Lunch on site

1 - Continue working on ideas, finish prototype

4:30 - Present prototypes and successes

5:00 - Next steps, mailing lists/groups, wrap-up

6 - Civic Hacking end, head off to dinner and drinks with your new friends

PROJECT TRACKS

We are pre-planning a number of projects for this year's event, idenifying resources and laying the groundwork in advance. You can align yourself with one of these projects we hope to ship by the end of the day, or come with your own ideas.

Help one of our non-profits (list coming soon) get their data online for the public
Create an open data portal on CDA website (or yours) using CKAN, and fill it with community data
Use Louisville GIS data to build the city in Minecraft, like Denmark
Getting data from Louisville's Air Quality Eggs
Editing Open Street Map in your neighborhood
Setup Curious City for a local non-profit
Deploy Shareabouts crowdsourced mapping application for a non-profit
Map trails and points of interest for Bernheim Forest
Take raw Olmsted Parks data and visualize new tree plantings in Shelby Park

At this event, we are going to focus on finishing a product in just 7 hours. Just like at Hacktucky, the motto will be "if it doesn't ship, it doesn't exist!" So we'll work together to make a MVP and cut features as needed. Idea, design, data, coding, UI, and hosting all needs to come together, so we need everyone's help!

SWAG!

Big News! Google is providing $500 in Google Cloud Platform hosting for each and every attendee!

Amazon is providing $50 in free AWS credit to all attendees again this year!

And we've got some cool wrist bands, stickers, and a few hoodies to hand out.

WHAT TO BRING

Your laptop, power cables, software, smart phones, chargers, monitors, mice, ideas, and half finished projects.

HOW TO PREPARE

Familiarize yourself with at these data sources to see what's out there:

Louisville Open Data Portal
Data.gov
TARC's Transit Feed
YourMapper (get a free account and API key before the event)
Metro Mapper's Local Open Data Lists
Join the CDA group

The event is meant to be a technical programming, app building, hacking experience. We will be working together to build actual apps during the event.

If you are non-technical, we still need your help. During the event entrepreneurs business, marketing, and regular citizens can help steer the direction of the development and explore great ideas with the techies, and work on the presentation and communitating the idea clearly. You can also spend some time updating your neighborhood's Open Street Map data using the new iD online editing tool.

VOLUNTEERS

We are looking for volunteers for this year's event to help with organizing, planning, day-of activities, picking up food and drinks, etc. Contact us at the Civic Data Alliance, Louisville's Code for America brigade and the organizing body for this year's NDoCH. Sign up and post at the official Civic Data Alliance forums and look there and on Twitter for meetup times.

HASHTAGS

Our hashtag is #hackville. Our local organizer's handle is @CivicDataAlly. The national hashtag is #hackforchange. The national organization is @civichackingday.

RESOURCES

As a national contributor for NDoCH, YourMapper has made its open data and CrimeScore APIs open to all hackers for free!

YourMapper API - Details - Free API Ultra Plan - Github

CrimeScore API - Details - Free API Ultra Plan - Github

CLICK: See a RECAP of 2013 event.

MEDIA COVERAGE

Insider Louisville - #Hackville returns: National Day of Civic Hacking on Saturday, May 31
WHAS11 - National Day of Civic Hacking comes to Louisville

CONTACT

Contact one of your local organizers (listed below) to find out how to help, sponsor, or if you have questions. About National Day of Civic HackingOn May 31 and June 1, 2014, we’ll be making history all over again. For the second time, the National Day of Civic Hacking will unite technologists, entrepreneurs, developers and other citizens in using open data to improve communities and the governments that serve them.

SPONSORS & PARTNERS

CrimeScore: A Local Open Data Safety API

2014-03-24T14:03:00.002-04:00

CrimeScore is a new local open data API by YourMapper that gives you a detailed safety grade at your current location.

CrimeScore: A Safety Rating for Your Location

Methodology

CrimeScore rating uses a propriety methodology based on address-level open data crime reports, weighted for type of crime, recency, and proximity, then adjusted by neighboring CrimeScore ratings, and finally statistically standardized across a bell curve based on all the CrimeScores across a city, updated daily.

Coverage Areas

Our nationwide crime rating for your location is available in the following cities, with more being added soon.

San Francisco, CA
Washington, DC
Anchorage, AK
Louisville, KY
Miami, FL
Fort Worth, TX
Chicago, IL
Seattle, WA
Indianapolis, IN
Albuquerque, NM
Richmond, VA
Cincinnati, OH
Atlanta, GA

Coming Soon:

Portland, OR
Kansas City, MO
Lexington, KY
Philadelphia, PA
…and more

API Access

Directly access the CrimeScore API, with dynamic documentation and in-browser testing on Mashape.

Mashape CrimeScore API

Also, check out our GitHub repository for a server-side example using Mashape, and full code for an interactive online browser map.

Badges and Graphics

We have a variety of badges (download) you can use on your website or app that are color coded to show grades, and only require you to overlay the grade or score that we return for a location.

CrimeScore badge graphics

Pebble App

CrimeScore is a GPS enabled Pebble app that calculates a composite score based on the amount of crime in your immediate area.

Pebble CrimeScore: GPS Safety Rating

We’ve submitted it to Pebble’s online app challenge through ChallengePost.

If you have a moment, head over there and vote or leave a comment!

iPhone App

SafetyCheck is a mobile iphone app that gives you a CrimeScore rating at your current location. The app shows a rating from 1 to 10 of your current safety level, and the number of recent crimes in your area. It uses the API to keep all the data processing server-side.

SafetyCheck Local iPhone App

Google Glass App

AskOpenData.com has integrated the CrimeScore API into his Washington DC Google Glass transit directions app called Ask Metro. It lets you know the crime rating of the station you are headed to.

Ask Metro CrimeScore Integration

Your App?

Get starting adding a CrimeScore rating to your existing services, adding value and information for your new and existing clients. Or come up with your own app or service based on ideas we haven’t even thought of yet!

TARC Real-Time Bus Data Published to Google

2014-01-27T11:21:00.000-05:00

TARC had a January 17, 2014 press conference with the Metro Government about releasing their real-time bus data to the public and to Google. Google is now absorbing it and using it automatically to adjust schedules when you get tarnsit directions on your desktop (Google hasn't updated their mobile apps with any real-time data from any city yet).

They also worked with Trapeze to create a decent trip planner (desktop only) that shows the real time location of each bus. Interestingly, this web app is getting the bus locations every 3 seconds (here, though no data without post request and header info - look at developer console to see JSON data being returned) through an AJAX request, while the public feed is only updated every 60 seconds. That's an unfortunate difference...

With the public feed, I was able to create a real-time snapshot of every active bus in the city, along with info about how early/late it is, next stop arrival time, route, etc. Again, this only really works well on a desktop. We have created a developer API to allow anyone get the positions and meta data of each bus for thier own ( hopefully better) app or website.

Ted Smith announced at the press conference that the city would be having a $1,000 developer contest to create the best service that helps get people riding the bus and visiting local businesses and attractions. As of now (Jan 27), there is no information on the rules, deadlines, or details of this contest.

It does make me think of The Next Bus app I developed for the Society of News Design's international conference, which was held in Louisville in November. There was a 24 hour hack-a-thon called Hacktucky that my team won, though the other 4 teams made some great products too. The Next Bus was a site that did just what this contest requires: gets people riding the bus to local destinations with minimal effort and real-time bus tracking.

While currently there is no way to get Louisville real-time bus data on your mobile device, there are 4 Apple iOS apps I found that have transit data for Louisiville and other cities, and real-time locations for some cities, so these might be adding Louisville real-time data soon.

HopStop - The only public transit app you'll ever need.

Transit App - Whereever you are, instantly know when the next bus or train is arriving.

Transit Directions - Transit app provides public transportation navigation for your iPhone/iPad.

Roadify - Getting around your city is easier than ever.

Let's hope that after the city's contest is announced and finished, we have a few good local services that use TARC's real-time bus data.

Geospacial Open Data in KY - Louisville v Lexington (Part 2)

2012-11-20T14:36:00.002-05:00

Following up on my last post about the state of open data in Kentucky, I want to now do a detailed comparison of every city in Kentucky that has open data online, and give them some sort of ranking.

Right now, only Louisville and Lexington, KY's two largest cities, have any open data as far as I know. Please leave a comment if you know of another city or have heard another one might be opening their data soon.

There are two types of geospacial open data I'm going to look at, CSV/OMG formatted bulk address-level data, and GIS layer/shape data. The CSV data is good to pull into a standard database and create javascript based online maps of point visualizations, like we do at Your Mapper. The GIS data is great for doing offline (though some online) visualizations and creating map-based reports and analysis, like Map Grapher does.

I prefer the bulk CSV data format, because if you want to you can import this into a GIS system, but it's harder to break GIS data in a CSV format for generic database loading. Having said that, some data is best output in GIS formats, like polygon area outlines (instead of point data).

I'd also like to point out what open data is. It's not just that it's data on a website in an interactive form, or a PDF to download. And it doesn't count if it costs money for a complete download. See the 8 principles of open data for a list, and I'd like to add that historic data is a ninth principle.

Louisville v. Lexington

Right now, the only two cities in KY with an open data portal are Louisville and Lexington. So it's a UK v. UofL, or Red vs. Blue, matchup for now. The data are things like crime reports, 311 calls, business licenses, restaurant health ratings, building permits, bike racks, parking meters, property values, recent home sales, vacant properties, and foreclosures, and also GIS layer data.

So let's compare the two in the hopes of fostering some friendly competition and pushing each other to open more data.

Methodology

For this comparison, things are going to be a little arbitrary, ie, mostly what I would like to see opened up, and what I believe to be important. But I am referencing existing open data city portals across the United States to see what they have opened.

Each dataset on the list that is open and freely downloadable gets a point. It gets a bonus point if the city has included Latitude and Longitude for each point.

It also gets a bonus point if it includes historic data, although the only dataset that has historic data in this list also has it released by the city is Louisville Restaurant Health Ratings. For example, Louisville has opened crime reports, but it's only the last 90 days, and building permits, but it's only currently open permits.

So here is the point chart of open data for Louisville and Lexington!

Dataset

Louisville

Lexington

CSV

GIS/KML

CSV

GIS/KML

Point Data

Crime Reports

Yes, Lat/Lon

311 Calls

Property Maintenance

Yes, Lat/Lon

Liquor Licenses

Yes, Lat/Lon

Code Violations

Fires

Fire Stations

Yes, Lat/Lon

Historic Landmarks

Yes, Lat/Lon

Trees

Business Licenses

Restaurant Health Ratings

Yes, Lat/Lon, Historic

Building Permits

Yes, Lat/Lon

Bike Racks

Parking Meters

Property Values

Recent Home Sales

Vacant Properties

Yes, Lat/Lon

Foreclosures

Public Transit Stops

Yes, Lat/Lon

Parks

Yes, Lat/Lon

Sub Points

Sub Total

Louisville

Lexington

CSV

GIS/KML

CSV

GIS/KML

Lines/Areas Data

Bike Trails

Yes, Lat/Lon

Bike Paths

Yes, Lat/Lon

Council Districts

Yes, Lat/Lon

Parcel Boundaries

Yes, Lat/Lon

Elevation

Yes, Lat/Lon

Street Data

Yes, Lat/Lon

Traffic Signals

Yes, Lat/Lon

Zoning

Yes, Lat/Lon

Utilities

Railroads

Yes, Lat/Lon

Sewer

Yes, Lat/Lon

Flooding

Yes, Lat/Lon

Neighborhoods

Yes, Lat/Lon

Sub Points

Sub Total

Louisville

Lexington

CSV

GIS/KML

CSV

GIS/KML

Total Points

Total Score

The Final Total Score is

Louisville - 17

Lexington - 34

Lexington is the current winner!

Recommendations

Basically, Louisville should open their GIS data, and Lexington should open their CSV data. Then this exercise would be a more fair comparison.

Both cities are doing a great job of including latitude and longitude with each dataset.

Louisville should look at opening all of its historic data for crime, licenses, maintenance, and permits.

Both cities should open a wider range of datasets from the lists above.

Other cities should get on board with open data as well. I'd love to see Owensboro, Frankfort, Paducah, Bowling Green, Pikeville, Covington, Ashland, and Glasgow launch open data portals.

The state itself should also open its data, like property values, sex offenders, and crime reports from its KYOps system.

What do you think? Let me know if I have missed anything important, or done any math incorrectly.

Hopefully I can generate some discussion about what is open data, how effective is each city at opening their data, and what each needs to do to open more. What would you use open data for?

Open Data in Kentucky: An Overview (Part 1)

2012-11-15T11:58:00.001-05:00

As the national and international movement for open data and government transparency progresses, I'd like to take a moment and discuss the state of things here in Kentucky.

Open Data Definition

First let's define "open data." To me this means that the raw data is available in a bulk download format, like CSV, as opposed to online web databases or PDFs. These later types of data are more part of government 'transparency' initiatives, rather than open data. Open data should also be as complete as possible, including historic data, to the extent that privacy laws allow.

Financial Data

This is the highest priority for government transparency pushes, and with good reason. There is a great amount of open data regarding government financial records at Kentucky's Transparency Portal, KY Citizen Auditor Initiative, Louisville's LouieStat, Louisville Salary and Expenditure data, and other similar data in KY's larger cities.

Public Transit Data

Covington KY was the first to open its public transit feed to the public, with Lexington, then Louisville following. This allows Google and other companies to absorb public transit schedules and routes to allow the building of direction and travel time applications. Almost every county in KY has public transit, but most have not made this data available.

Property Data

Property open data is in need of a big overhaul in KY. Kentucky is unique in the USA because it has county Property Valuation Administrators (PVAs) that asses the taxable values of all property in their county. Interestingly, these are state-run organizations, with state-level rules and recommendations for opening data and data pricing requests. Not one of the 120 counties have open property value data. Instead, each charge for bulk downloads and extended property data info. Some have online text searches, and a few have map visualizations usually run by local or out-of-state vendors, of varying quality and usefulness.

Other Data

Kentucky has an excellent car accident database, and you can grab very detailed open data from it. Actually, I'd say this is the most complete non-GIS open data set in KY, though the web interface is a bit cumbersome.

The KY Sex Offender database has data available online, but there is no way to download the raw data. I suspect part of this is because of the State Police's use of a closed third-party tool, which is unfortunate for us all.

GIS Open Data

GIS data is what helps make city government more efficient - it maps everything a city government needs to know about: snow routes, power lines, water lines, property boundaries, street names, and so much more. But, it's really only useful internally, and so far most KY city govs haven't pushed that data out to visualizations on websites, except Louisville, though Lexington has clunky version. And no one has opened their GIS data for free download, until Lexington did last week. Another bright spot is at the state level, where KY has not only visualizations of their GIS data online, but also allows open data downloads.

Geospacial Open Data

Now we get to the kind of data I am interested in and aggregate on Your Mapper. CSV or OMG Standard formatted raw hyperlocal data that is specific to the street address level. Things like crime reports, 311 calls, business licenses, restaurant health ratings, building permits, bike racks, parking meters, property values, recent home sales, vacant properties, and foreclosures. This is where I'd like to draw up some friendly city comparisons in the spirit of cooperative competition. I'll throw in GIS too since Lexington has done such a good job with it.

In my next blog post, I'll get into a detailed comparison, so stay tuned.

Any other open data I've missed across the state? Let me know in the comments and I'll update the post.

Lexington KY Publishes Open Data

2012-11-09T17:11:00.002-05:00

Lexington KY is the newest city in the world to create an open data portal for its citizens. Their mission is to promote the openness, transparency and accountability of local government by providing high-value government data in standards compliant, machine readable format. This will serve as the basis for the creation of useful civic applications by third party developers.

From their website:

"For the initial launch, Lexington is providing free access to its geographic information. Over 80 geographic data layers from the city’s enterprise GIS are available and will be updated on a quarterly basis. Links to existing applications promoting the transparency of the legislative process as well as crime data are accessible from the “applications menu”.

In the coming months we will continue to expand our data catalog and offerings to build on the foundation we have established."

There are 85 datasets in either GIS Shapefile or KML format, great for overlaying on maps on and using offline for analysis. I talked to Chad Cottle, Director of Enterprise IT Solutions and the chair of Open Data Lexington, via email to get some history.

About a year ago, the local grassroots community (Open Lexington) approached the city asking them to open up their data, etc....the Council passed a resolution placing the city (for the first time) in a position to actually open up data without going the FOIA route.

So, we brought together our city IT team, the community hacktivisits, the University of Kentucky and other “community movers and shakers” to start collaborating on what kind of stuff that citizens or “geeks” would want. Working through some user stories we concluded that there were basically 2 audiences.

The first being mom and dad at home who are interested in data viz, infographics, canned answers (like pre-defined queries), etc. This is also the more app-focused audience. For example, to use Louistat as a frame of reference, “how much police and fire overtime was there in 2011”? We will also develop apps to engage the citizen and inform them (think open311, etc.). On our site we link to two apps/websites that are more “easy access” focused: Legistar and RAIDS online.

Audience two are the geeks, hardcore analysts, etc. who want raw, non-manufactured, non-derivative data. We decided to start with GIS because most of the apps that could be built were location-based or location-aware. In essence, this becomes the canvas on which the artist will paint.

The open data portal if for audience #2, the entrepreneurs and data geeks, who can use this raw data to build great things. The site was built using the open source CKAN toolkit, and implemented by local Lexington entrepreneur Nick Such. The city paid for it to implemented and hosted in the cloud, so it was very inexpensive, though I imagine it took a lot of time internally to gather all the data and get full buy in, which is always a challenge.

Chad says this is Phase 1. The next phase starts right now and will be things like code violations, building inspection data, and 311 calls for service. Hopefully data visualizations focused around the flow of money in the city will come next too.

Congratulations to Lexington, which now joins Louisville in the open data realm. My next post will focus on the similarities and differences on both city's sites, services, formats, and open data, in the hope of fostering some friendly competition. Viva open data!

2nd Annual Louisville Transportation Camp Recap

2012-11-08T11:57:00.000-05:00

Last night was the 2nd annual Louisville Transportation Camp, and the event was another huge success! Over 40 people where there, including Ted Smith, Barry Barker, and representatives from different TARC and city departments, including Metro Technology, were there and provided insights and took feedback.

Also there were local entrepreneurs from Mavizon, Awesome Inc, Insider Louisville, Peak 10, Taco Punk, Forge, Building Layer, MapGrapher, and Roobiq.

After a tour of TARC's Gold LEED Certified building (the only government building to be certified as such in the nation, according to TARC), Ted Smith had some opening remarks, I gave a quick recap from last year's camp and talked about open data and the Your Mapper API, and Barry Barker discussed current initiatives and challenges at TARC, including getting a grant for all electric buses next year, RFID smart payment cards, route optimization, dedicated bus lanes, and budget constraints.

Current Status

Last year TARC opened its GTFS feed to Google and the public, allowing transit directions in all of Google's Map applications, and devs to build tools using the data. While I'm not aware of Louisville developers that have used the data, there are lots of national services that have picked it up and ran with it, like HopStop, City Maps, and Transit App, and eventually Apple and Bing Maps. Anyone in Louisville can leverage TARC transit directions within these apps. City Go Round has another Louisville app list.

Real-Time Data

Finally we moved on to discussing the state of real-time GPS from the busses. Currently, TARC is using third party software to allow them to manage their bus locations, called Trapeze. Unfortunately, while this allows them to know the location of all 200+ busses via GPS at the TARC headquarters, the software does not allow export of this live data, for use in the real-time public feed.

TARC is pressuring Trapeze to upgrade their software to allow this. By December, it is expected to be available on TARC's site on their Trip Planner (powered by Trapeze). Green Bay Metro already uses this, if you want to see it in action now.

Then by March there should be another update that allows the data to be sent to the GTFS Realtime data feed, allowing real-time bus locations to be known by the public and Google. This will make bus arrival times more accurate in apps and services, and allow animated maps to be creating showing all the city busses locations at once.

In the meantime, Mavizon offered to place their devices on any number of busses, I offered to make a web interface to visualize their locations on a map, and Peak 10 offered to host the servers, all for at no cost to TARC. So we'll see if this pilot program idea moves forward at TARC.

Camera Feeds and Open Seats

Every TARC bus has multiple cameras installed, recording events locally. But transmitting these images to the public is not feasible since they are encrypted by the vendor for security, and are high-res enough to cause bandwidth and cost issues even if they could be transmitted. So the solution is to install an additional lower res camera and transmit that in isolation. The goal would be to use software to detect the number of open seats and add this data to the real time apps.

But I believe the cost for this outweighs the benefit for now. There are likely better solutions for counting passengers, using lasers, pressure plates in seats or exits, and other means. But these will require some hardware installation and software to transmit the data back in real-time. And I'm not sure that knowing how full a bus is will affect your decision to ride it very much. Though it would be neat to see a map of every bus with color-coded markers showing capacity across the city, and a clickable live image of the passengers.

There also could be an app that could accomplish this through crowdsourcing. A kind of Waze for busses. Riders could report back on bus conditions, like capacity, noise, smells, mood, issues, etc. I'm not sure how to get usage of this however, unless it's incorporated into a custom app that provides transit directions (like the ones listed earlier) and other features to keep users engaged. But an idea worth pursuing for entrepreneurs.

Wi-Fi On-Board

Having Wi-fi access for passengers would be a great perk for bus riders, especially long-ride commuters, who could use the time to occupy themselves on laptops, tablets, iPod touches, and dedicated gaming devices. One idea was to have some wireless hotspots that could be tested out on some busses to gauge demand. Another was to partner with Boingo or GoGo to install paid wifi for customers, much like airlines do - that way TARC is not out of pocket and in fact can generate revenue shares from these services.

Summary

Like last year, there was a great energy and enthusiasm on the part of the public, local entrepreneurs, Metro Louisville, and TARC. The ideas were a bit more focused this year, and seem to be within reach. The next camp might be as early as March, when the real-time GPS feed is likely to launch. Thanks to everyone who attended and let's keep the momentum going!

Other Coverage

Insider Louisville
Adam Fish - Forge

Louisville Metro Partnership: Crime Incidents Map

2012-01-28T11:17:00.000-05:00

The city of Louisville Metro has partnered with our government open data services and mapping company GovMapper to bring a daily crime incident reports map from the LMPD to the citizens of Louisville.

There are maps for every police division and beat in the city, with data updating daily. The map customizations also allow the LMPD to include links to specific dynamic maps highlighting recent crimes for their community newsletter alerts.

Launched last week, this is the first time citizens can get daily crime updates from the LMPD with date range and category filtering.

The service also includes mobile phone access, search exporting, and city-wide heatmaps of crime. It allows full access to the raw data with latitude and longitude, fostering transparency and open data. Programmers can also grab the data on-demand for their sites and apps through the Your Mapper API.

Your Mapper also curates a complimentary detailed historic crime reports map going back to 2003, which is updated every month.

Saving the City Money

I credit the office of Mayor Greg Fischer with helping to get this project started (via a tweet in June), and seeing the opportunity for cost savings from public online mapping. From there Metro Technology Services took over to bring the map to fruition. They turned to us, the only area Google Qualified Maps Developer.

One of MTS's goals is to save the city, and therefore taxpayers, money across all departments. They know that by promoting government transparency and open data by putting data online in a way the general public could understand and use would have a huge ROI by reducing the thousands of FOIA requests the city has to fill. If the public can discover, visualize, and export the data they need online 24/7, then wouldn't have to contact the city for time-consuming data requests.

Another goal of MTS is to create a catalog of raw open data for the public to download and use on their desktop, on websites, and in mobile apps. To this end they have Louisville's Open Data Initiative, which aggregates data across agencies. GovMapper has enhanced their raw crime data by adding latitude and longitude to each report, and then providing the entire dataset for download on the public open data site (see CrimeStats.txt).

Louisville Transportation Camp Recap

2011-12-13T10:57:00.002-05:00

Last night was the first Louisville Transportation Camp, and the event was a huge success! It was sold out and we were over capacity for sure (40+ people). Mayor Fisher participated, and Ted Smith, Tom Owen, Barry Barker, and about 15 representatives from different TARC and city departments, including Metro Technology and PARC, were there and provided insights and took feedback.

It was a lively and spirited discussion about what information is currently available, what the public would like to see, and ideas for apps and websites that can use and combine the data in a useful way for citizens and visitors. A number of datasets were pinpointed for future release by the city and TARC, including real-time GPS TARC bus locations, safe biking routes, pedestrian and bike injury/fatality locations, and locations of all parking garages and meters.

Other datasets were requested by people, but with no timeline or ability to release yet, including TRIMARC camera, sign and speed info, TARC bus real-time capacity and historic ridership info, real-time parking meter and garage occupancy, and real-time 311 calls.

Some developers showed off mobile and web apps they had been working on, including a total overview of the TARC system on a Google map, a mobile iPhone app that combined TARC stops and routes with data from the Your Mapper API (restaurants, car accidents, crime, etc), and an app for blind people to navigate the bus system easily.

Other ideas were for a widget that restaurants can embed in their site showing their current health rating with interactive transit and biking directions to their location, a bike safety site, a mobile app that would alert riders when their bus was getting close, a site that would show you how far you could get on TARC in a certain time frame, and a parking space finder and bike lockup finder tool.

Looking forward, I'd like to hold a camp every time a new dataset is opened by the city. Also, some people requested a Hack-a-thon which would be more tech focused and allow local programmers to create actually apps and sites over the course of a day using the available open data. I'll help put this together as the interest level rises and more data becomes available.