Open Tucson

Andrew found an interested article related to our SunTracker project.

“In D.C., as in many other places, the intention is that by giving people more information, more often, and more easily, they will make better choices about their mobility.”

Read the rest of the article here:

http://thecityfix.com/digital-displays-for-transit-can-more-information-mean-more-riders/

Andrew’s efforts with Code for America and Open Tucson are mentioned in the December issue of Fast Company:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/151/icitizen-bonus.html

It’s a great article about the government 2.0, and worth reading. The relevant excerpt:

In 2009, while she was working with O’Reilly on the Gov 2.0 Summit, she heard from Andrew Greenhill, chief of staff to the mayor of Tucson — who happened to be married to her childhood friend Valerie. “I was tweeting and blogging around gov 2.0,” says Pahlka, “and Andrew was telling me, ‘You need to pay attention to the local level because cities are in major crisis. Revenues are down, costs are up — if we don’t change how cities work, they’re going to fail.’ “

Greenhill, a Vassar graduate with a master’s degree in English who spent two years with Teach for America, may not seem like the most likely tech advocate in government. But he had brought a customized version of SeeClickFix to Tucson, and had also helped introduce a Live BusTracker app. In 2009, he cofounded OpenTucson, a not-for-profit dedicated to developing more apps for the community. His motivation is as much financial as techno-utopian. “Our entire general fund budget was at one point about $493 million. Now it’s down to $443 million, and we’re facing a $51 million deficit in fiscal year 2012,” he says. “The application of technology in government can do as much as anything to make government more efficient and effective, more transparent, and more participatory and collaborative.”

Greenhill and Pahlka began discussing the outlines of what eventually became Code for America, a one-year fellowship recruiting developers to work for city government. They decided that any potential fellows would have to go through a rigorous application process, and that they would be equally ruthless in demanding buy-in from the cities they worked with. Only then would programmers be embedded in city hall, to spend a year working closely with city managers to design web solutions to public problems.

Posted by Kit Plummer

Hey OpTucs.

Just wanted to give props to Lucas Taylor for making a small, and needed, updated to the Busted feed service.

https://github.com/kitplummer/Busted/pull/1

The details of the fix aren’t really all that important or exciting here. What is really cool, and worth sharing, is the actual process of collaboration.

This is how I think it went down. At the last Open Tucson shindig, which Lucas and I attended, we discussed a few ideas about how the group can participate in the opening of Tucson’s data sources and promote greater transparency within the local governments. One of the solutions, that actually started during our Great American Hackathon last year, was the retrofitting of the SunTran bus feed into a more usable and accessible format – and has been dubbed Busted (by me). Busted has since turned into an opportunity for further development as a data source for a few different ideas revolving around local-business advertising and mobile applications.

Because Busted is open source Lucas was not only able to access the data feed, but also the code that actually does the raw data transformations. Lucas found a small issue with one of the bus feeds. (In my opinion this is where things get really cool.) Because the code is hosted at http://github.com, a social coding and collaboration site, Lucas was able to “clone” my repository into his own personal environment and make the required changes. The key here is that he was able to do so without me even knowing – or having to gain permission to my repository. Lucas then made the fixes.

Obviously it doesn’t end here. Because most open source development is done, well, in the ope n – there are typical geographic distribution challenges to overcome. The software development world, long familiar with this requirement, has create various tools to help work with distributed code. One of those, and the backbone of Github, is called git. Git is distributed version control system (DVCS) that provides the “cloning” capability that allowed Lucas to copy my repository and work within his own environment. Git also provides an apparatus for distributing the changes that Lucas made, back to me, or anyone else for that matter (who might have also cloned my repository). Git calls this transaction a “pull request” and Github makes this dead simple by generating the request and sending it to me as message (email too). For me to incorporate Lucas’ fix it took a couple steps and voila, we’re now in sync and my repository has been updated and Busted has been made better. It took a single additional step for me to send the new Busted to t he “cloud” and affect the “live” feed.

All of this sounds really complex, or really easy – but let me assure it is closer to the latter. The value of data transparency is only the starting point for improving our governments. Transparency is required all the way out to the organizations and communities who are creating solutions. Open Tucson and all of the other “Government 2.0” organizations need more of this type of collaboration. Thanks to Lucas for the opportunity to highlight the coolness of “openness”.

Kit

We’ve got a quick prototype up for the kiosk app. You can see it here:

http://www.opentucson.org/busted/

This is the kiosk app that you would see if you were sitting at the bruegger’s at the corner of Campbell & Speedway. This is live data from the sun-tran website that’s been scraped and repackaged by Kit’s earlier work.

What’s left to do:

1. rotate the ads
2. show countdown times, i.e. (next bus in XXX minutes rather than just “at 5:30″)
3. better error handling (for instance, will this work at 7 tonight when there are no further busses?)
4. pretty up the interface
5. it’d be cool to show the bus(s) on a map every 10 seconds or so

Any other suggestions or ideas?

Kit Plummer cranked out a feed proxy for the SunTran data over the weekend, allowing anyone to develop web and/or mobile apps based on both static route data and live bus tracking data. Check out his demo page here:

http://busted.kitplummer.apigee.com

Comments? Ideas?