Thirtieth hacknight; thirty-three participants.
No presentation; open hacknight.
Breakout groups:
- Civic Tech 101 – Emily
- Toronto budget – Henrik
- Accessing mental health services in Toronto – Mark
- Resources for Syrian refugees – Craig
- Community wifi mesh – Ben
- Planning applications – Gabe
- Human Experience Design – Howard
Thanks to Mozilla for hosting us!
Planning application group
Paolo, Tim, Josh, Gabe, Richard, Luke
There are two streams to this project:
1) Scraping data from the City website into a system that will allow us to explore it easily.
2) Conducting user research (with residents associations and BIAs, probably) to understand how potential users would like to use this information.
The group decided to focus on #1 tonight.
The scraper we built in November isn’t, it turns out, grabbing as much of the data as we thought — we need to redesign it.
Though we’re currently working on scraping the data, we will continue to advocate for the data to be made open.
By scraping the data and building use cases for the data, we will strengthen the arguments for making the data open.
IBMS is City planning’s data management system
It has a bunch of endpoints which provide access to different aspects of its database.
Basically what we’re doing is partially reconstructing the database by requesting data through several of these endpoints.
Mapping out the endpoints. Basically:
– There’s one for properties
– And one for applications (key: folderRSN)
Next steps:
– Josh will scrape the data into MongoDB so that we can look at the shape of it.