Twenty-third hacknight – 30 participants.
No presenter tonight — open hacknight.
Breakout groups:
- Henrik – Toronto budget project: support informed debate about the City budget
- Derakshan – Refuees Welcome Toronto
- Dorothy – Refugee experience
- Alex – Open Orders
- Chloe – Community Solutions Lab
Thanks to Architech for the venue and dinner!
Workgroup: Toronto Budget Project
Participants: Henrik, Hanifa, Marc D, Marc L, Emily, Gabriel G, Shabs
Marc D helped us focus and develop an action plan:
Basic strategy — focus on the budget timeline content collected by Hanifa, and get it published. Deal with presentation refinement, interactivity etc later, as refactorings.
So, the action plan:
– Hanifa will summarize her data into a tabular format for Emily
– Emily will massage this data, and implement as a static json file
– Gabe, as dev lead, will set up a git platform for an initial website, supported by react and material-ui
– Emily, as React dev will implement the React code, working with Gabe
Meanwhile:
– Henrik will set up a base cloud server on Digital Ocean (thanks DO for giving CivicTechTO a credit!)
– Marc L will provision the server according to Henrik’s provisioning of his local vm server, applying his (Marc’s) and his team’s expertise for refinements
This will make the server available for the dev team after the initial dev is functioning on git.
Henrik set up a git repo in the CivitTechTO git space for this initial project, and added the devs and Marc as collaborators
We agreed to meet for reviews on the first and third Tuesdays of each month.
Architech’s blog post about the refugee project is here: http://blog2.architech.ca/h/i/190026982-civic-hacking-for-syrian-refugees-in-canada
In the discussion after Civic Tech 101, we talked about:
– Archiving old open datasets — a role for the Toronto Archives?
– The challenges of opening City data
– The challenges of working with open datasets in confusing formats
– The role of community, non-profit and private sector in working constructively with government
– Dataset owners in government might be really disconnected from open data users
People voiced interest in several topics, including:
– Architectural (and other) walking tours
– Projects involving youth, especially outside of downtown
– Projects through which to build experience working with data
Tim demo-ed the map he built using Google Fusion Tables of OMB appeals — this could be great to cross-reference with the planning application dataset.