Skip to content

Hacknight #53: Keith McDonald

Fifth-third hacknight; 56 participants.

Presenter: Keith McDonald

Presentation: PDF Complete

Breakout groups:

  • Civic Tech 101: Alox
  • Budgetpedia: Linda {comms plan/writers/designers/etc}
  • Mapping (healthcare) demand & supply: Oliver {mapping / data exploration}
  • Section 37 funding transparency: Abdi {data advocacy & planning}
  • Policing Complaints on Carding (PCOC): Zakaria {comms, UX, webdev, outreach}
  • Toronto Meshnet (community wifi): Ben {regroup!}
  • Freedom of Information (FOI) sharing: Jessica {web-based doc sharing!}
  • Mapping Elections Ontario data: Peter {planning & documentation}
  • Councilmatic: Patcon {info / Python / UX}
  • Project Lab: Gabe

Thanks to TWG for hosting us, and to Urban+Digital for food!

1 thought on “Hacknight #53: Keith McDonald”

  1. Project Lab notes: Kevin, Hao, Lia, Elena, Gabe

    We talked about:
    – very cool zoomable content interfaces
    – tree protection policy, and how to deliver the evidence that the City needs to pursue illegal tree removal
    – TTC vehicle location data
    – Toronto beach water quality

    Kevin has 2+ years of data on TTC locations. looking for something cool to do with it
    the TTC generally doesn’t seem to try to use (this kind of) data to solve problems / answer questions
    in contrast to Transportation Services, who

    IDEAS:

    tree protection:
    look to see if other civic tech groups have built tree protection apps
    see if other cities have made tree removal permit data open

    Toronto beach water quality:
    is actually posted 24 hours later
    which is a problem after a big rain storm, for example
    The City of Chicago and Chi Hacknight have been working on a beach water quality predictive model: https://github.com/Chicago/e-coli-beach-predictions
    It’s a pretty great story!
    Chicago has better data on sewage bypass — see http://istheresewageinthechicagoriver.com/
    The province has mandated that the City of Toronto must share sewage bypass data
    Lake Ontario Waterkeeper has the next best thing: http://www.waterkeeper.ca/blog/2015/6/16/toronto-sewage-bypass-log
    It’d be amazing to redeploy the Chicago app in Toronto!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.