1. CityCampAZ report: Chandler held a city camp on February 15 that Andrew and Ian attended. What we learned and what we could do here.

2. SunTracker Kiosk: next steps — location aware browser version? QR codes?

3. Inspirations and Project ideas: discuss ideas for other projects and leads — what’s happening in other cities

4. Code For America report: How the Code for America teams are doing, and what they’re learning

Please let me know if there’s anything else you want to discuss. See you Tuesday!

Spoke6 is at the corner of Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue.

“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/

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.

Join us — and feel free to bring your friends!

When: December 20 at 6pm
Where: 439 N 6th Avenue on the Southwest corner of 6th Avenue and 6th Street.

See you Monday! RSVP to ian@opentucson.org if you can so we can make sure we order enough food.

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’re going to hold our next Open Tucson meeting on Thursday, November 11 at 6:30pm at Spoke 6. (map)

If anyone has anything they want to talk about, let me know! For now, this is a list of possible/likely topics:

1. review of new developments in gov 2.0 world, i.e. new cool apps, etc. Andrew just got back from the OpenCities conference, and will give a quick report on:
   • Front Porch Forum:

     http://frontporchforum.com/

   • Localocracy:

     http://www.localocracy.org/#

   • Groundcrew:

     http://groundcrew.us/

   • Simpl:

     http://www.simpl.co/

   • Give A Minute:
     http://giveaminute.info/ and more generallyhttp://bigthink.com/ideas/24819
2. quick look at chumby / next steps for busted: Is this the app we want to move forward with as our pilot project? If so, what does it need to be ready? Who wants to shop it around to business owners, or determine which businesses might make a good test site? If not, what other project might we have the resources to work on? Some ideas include:
   • Environmental Services: Work with the City on adding the calendar/alert functions to our pickup schedule web app to mirror something like Vancouver’s VanTrash:
   • http://vantrash.ca/
   • SeeClickFix: build a dashboard to publicize and analyze the data already collected to show trends, to rank most common issues, to recognize for most active citizens, etc.
   • Opening Data: Work with the City to develop some open data streams so we can participate in DotGov’s project:
     http://dotgov.com/2010/10/winning-partner-cities-announced/  Tucson’s been selected to be a “Partner City” but we need the data streams to participate.
   • More Opening Data:  Work with the City to develop its new dashboard and open the data streams that fuel it.  It uses all kinds of real time demographic, financial and other data to illustrate the City’s position and they say it will be used to guide policy and process.
3. how things look for the city and gov 2.0 in light of budget woes.
4. follow up with phoenix group / city camp?

Spoke 6 is a co-working space run by Tim Bowen. We will have a projector, and there’s an (empty) refrigerator that keeps beer nice and cold.

We’re going to hold our next Open Tucson meeting on Thursday, October 7 at 6:30pm at Spoke 6. (map)

If anyone has anything they want to talk about, let me know! For now, this is a list of possible/likely topics:

1. Quick demo of “busted” kiosk (Ian Johnson)

2. City Camp intro (Andrew Greenhill)

“CityCamp is an unconference focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations.” Do we want to hold one here?

3. SunnyConf report from Kit Plummer:

“I was hanging with Luigi Montanez (Sunlight Labs) and Marc Chung (founder of PHXData.org) this weekend at SunnyConf – and we talked about trying to find some ways to get the Phoenix and Tucson mindshares together.  There’s a target “AppsFor” contest I believe – but, data sources are still the big question.”

3. Demo of some good open source apps:

bike crashes in tucson (map & twitter)
vantrash website (vancouver)
more!

4. Kit Plummer demoing http://pachube.com

Spoke 6 is a co-working space run by Tim Bowen. We will have a projector, and there’s an (empty) refrigerator that keeps beer nice and cold.

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?

http://busted.kitplummer.apigee.com

Comments? Ideas?