Forty-sixth hacknight – 45 participants.
Presenter: Andy Best from the City of Guelph
Breakout groups:
- Civic Tech 101: Irene
- Project Neutral: Jamie
- Councilmatic (development): patcon
- Councilmatic (UX): Gabe
- Mapping and visualizing Ontario election data: Peter
- Chat with Andy Best: Andy!
Thanks to ELN for co-hosting!
Breakout group: Councilmatic Toronto / User experience
Councilmatic:
how to do user testing?
how to launch it?
User groups:
1) People who do business with the City
2) Community groups
3) City staff
4) Journalists
Channels for getting the word out: #topoli, press gallery
Councillors who might support this: Cressy, Layton, Ainslie, Matlow, Thompson,
Be clear that “This is all information from the City of Toronto”
This might be most valuable for people who aren’t currently in the city hall “bubble” — people who don’t normally look up info about what’s happening at City Hall.
People who may not know who their councillor is, but care about a few specific issues.
Like Uber: it’s hard to find what’s relevant there.
Will users know what to search for? Uber? Weed dispensaries?
We’ll have an auto-thesaurus.
We could keep an eye out for what people are searching for.
It’d be handy to be able to see how councillors voted, where they stand on certain issues.
Cool feature: a link to sign up for councillors’ newsletters. And link to newsletter archive.
Of course, links to their twitter and website.
Links to ward profiles.
A page that explains the general flow of items:
committee -> council (pass/fail) -> sometimes back to committee
Idea: let volunteers post a summary of an issue
Idea: it’d be awesome to have timecodes to link it straight to video
Idea: make an annotation tool for the scoobies (council nerds) can tag timecodes
Idea: openparliament.ca style feed, integrating their tweets, mentions in news articles
Idea: show tweets on popular hashtags: #tocouncil, #excomm (executive committee)
Idea: a service to create a calendar of councillor meetings, town halls, etc.
Idea: Make the home page as helpful as possible.
– FAQs. What’s Councilmatic? What does City Council do?
– Like the first time you log into Gmail.
– People who know what they want can zoom past the basics.
– Friendly!
– What do the different committees do?
– Who gets to be a councillor?
Idea: list most popular pages, search terms, etc.
Gabe will start a Slack channel: proj-councilmatic-ux