Fifth-third hacknight; 56 participants.
Presenter: Keith McDonald
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!
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!