Independent Work - Civic Computing Projects

Overview:

The theme for this seminar is inspired by the “civic hacking” community whose mission objective can be described by the following examples:

• Code For America has a “Civic Hacking Day,” which is described as “a national event bringing together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs across the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent using publicly-released data, code, and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states, and our country.”
• Alex Howard, on his blog, defines civic innovation as a “new idea or method that improves the lives of citizens, the functions of cities, the practice of citizenship, or the state of community affairs.”

For further motivation, read the first chapter of Josh Tauber's book, Open Government.

This IW seminar is not about hacking. In general, the goal of this seminar is to develop IW projects that can have an impact - locally, nationally or even globally. Projects may involve and/or extend existing (open-source) projects, or they can be entirely new ventures. Projects can involve mobile devices, web platforms, cloud-based backends, open APIs/data, hardware sensors, etc. But the end result should, quite simply, help people and communities in some way.

Expectations:

1. Students are expected to research and define their own “problem area.” Students are expected to apply their own interests and passions to define a project.
2. We will have weekly meetings, where each student must provide a status report for their project. These meetings are mandatory.
3. Students will also schedule weekly meetings with the instructor to ensure their IW is on track.
4. Depending on schedules, we will likely participate in a few relevant “meetups.” For example, the BetaNYC Meetup holds periodic meetings in New York to discuss civic-related projects. Other potential meetups include Princeton-Tech and NYC-Internet of Things. Students may even present their work at these meetups.
5. Projects must comply with all IW requirements.
6. Students should contact Dr. Kaplan (ak18 [at] cs princeton edu) to find out more information.

Potential Project Topics:

• Restoring Trenton civic tools: Improving the user interface of interactive vacant property data site restoringtrenton.org, and creating tools on it to engage community. This will be a pilot that can potentially be expanded to a see-click-fix interface for other issues as well. It will include:
  • Using Leaflet, JS, etc. to improve interactivity of map, enabling people to click on map and directly report issues/observations to us + City
  • Creating additional tools to filter, search, and download the data + partial data sets
  • Potentially integrating it with Street View + other tools

• Garden Community: A tool to engage Trentonians around three connected aspects of Isles.org's work: our garden support network, our nascent Clean and Green program to care for parks + vacant lots, and (of course) our vacant property data. The student will work with our garden team to envision what this (app? plugin to restoringtrenton?) needs to include. Possibilities are:
  • Help the user identify whether a vacant lot would work as a community garden, based on exposure, soil, proximity of other gardens, lack of fresh food options, location of hydrants, etc.
  • Help prospective gardeners navigate the permitting system.
  • Have a social component to engage gardeners, would-be gardeners, seekers of fresh veggies, and the rest of the community.
  • Help gardeners garden, for instance by setting reminders for needed actions, tracking progress of seeds, enabling quick diagnosis of problems... Suggesting recipes... Etc.
  • Later on, it could link up gardeners and bodegas, restaurants, and individuals to get fresh food into communities while generating income. (This requires some infrastructure, but we'd like to get started.)

• Create a mobile geo-based framework that integrates commercial-off-the-shelf sensors (e.g., biometric, microscopes, radiological) with mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). Such a framework would enable collection and analysis of samples (such as medical or environmental) in the field.

• Experiment and innovate in the area of disaster communications using the BRCK platform. Overview of BRCK.. Create a “Crisis Stack” of software built on BRCK+Raspberry PI:
  • OSM tiles (Light) - Ex: https://github.com/ajturner/haitibrowser
  • OSM Sync - https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2013/04/29/openstreetmap-opens-up-to-more-contributors-with-easy-add-a-note-feature/
  • SMSsync - http://smssync.ushahidi.com/ rewritten to be native on the BRCK Device (without Pi)
  • LDLN - http://ldln.co/
  • Sahana Eden - http://sahanafoundation.org/products/eden/
  • Wiki - Gollum, Dokuwiki or Mediawiki
  • Etherpad / Etherpad-lite - https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite
  • BitTorrent Sync - http://www.bittorrent.com/sync
  • ONA - http://ona.io/
  • Enketo - https://enketo.org/
  • FrontlineSMS -http://www.frontlinesms.com/
  • Ping - http://pingapp.io/
  • Ushahidi - http://ushahidi.com
  • Piratebox - http://piratebox.cc/raspberry_pi:diy

• Develop a mobile pollution sensor to help communities understand how pollution impacts their lives.
  • Noise
  • Air Quality
  • Lapka Sensor
  • Windoo Sensor

• Develop a generic framework for enabling mobile apps interacting with transit info, such as the New York City subway, bus and rail systems, accessible to people with disabilities, primarily the blind and visually impaired. See AccessibleMTA project as an example.

• Extend the Adopt-a-Hydrant framwork to work with mobile devices and can be used by ANY community.

• Working with a local elementary school, develop a novel approach to teaching programming using the Raspberry Pi platform. The final result should be generic is the sense that it can be re-used by any elementary educator, either in the US or internationally.
  • Google Giving Grant Worth $1M To Fund Free Raspberry Pi For 15,000 U.K. Schoolkids
  • Code.org Launches Code Studio, A Toolset And Curriculum For Teaching Kids Programming

• Develop a curricilum for app development for middle school students. Specifically, becoming involved with Montgomery Upper Middle School teaching programming to a class of middle schoolers. A group of highly-motivated students from the class want to take their interest to the next level and create an app for the SAVE Animal Rescue Center. They've already worked out the details with SAVE and have begun work on a JavaScript web app, but have found that it's been too challenging to try and teach themselves JavaScript while building the app.

• Based on the MicroMappers framework, develop an automated/semi-automated approach to improve the analysis of UAV imagery for disaster response. See Want to support aid agencies without spending a penny? Edit a map (Also @hotosm @TheMissingMaps):
  • Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team [HOT] applies the principles of open source and open data sharing for humanitarian response and economic development.
  • Crowdsource Project for Typhoon Haiyan
  • GeoNode.org: GeoNode is a web-based application and platform for developing geospatial information systems (GIS) and for deploying spatial data infrastructures (SDI).
  • MapGive.gov: An initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Humanitarian Information Unit, makes it easy for new volunteers to learn to map and get involved in online tasks.
  • OSM Tasking Manager

• Develop a clothing donation framework, where donators of clothing can tag their donations (QR code? bar code?) and get feedback for when/where their donation was actually used by someone.

• Social Web Data for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Response Professionals: How can we extract actionable insights from user-generated Web feeds to help disaster response professionals make decisions and act? How do we model different global events from a variety of Web sources, and develop a trust model for community contributions to extract credible information? How do we identify and geolocate content sources?

Project Ideas - Links to Sites:

• Government apps: Sites, apps, and tools built by governments across the world to make government work better, together.
• Open source at MITRE: The MITRE Corporation has been involved with many different open source projects throughout the years, many of which have been founded by MITRE itself. This page is an incomplete list of projects that are available here on GitHub.
• Hack For Change: Many Challenges, Projects and Data.
• NY Civic Tech Projects
• Civic Ninjas
• Medic Mobile
• Civic Disclosure: Community forum, to discuss topics related to civic innovation, governance (at all levels) and decision making.
• Disaster.data.gov: features disaster-related datasets, tools, and updates on how to get involved.
• The White House Innovation for Disaster Response and Recovery Initiative: was first launched by the Administration in the wake of Hurricane Sandy to find the most effective ways technology can empower survivors, first responders, and local, state, tribal, territorial, and Federal Governments with critical information and resources. This page features apps and tools shared at the White House Innovation for Disaster Response and Recovery Demo Day to help address the challenges that severe weather and other disasters can pose to our communities.
• Challenge.gov: technical platform and list of challenge and prize competitions, all of which are run by more than 69 agencies across federal government. These include technical, scientific, ideation, and creative competitions where the U.S. government seeks innovative solutions from the public, bringing the best ideas and talent together to solve mission-centric problems. (Also @ChallengeGov and facebook.com/ChallengeGov)
• DigitalGov.gov: Challenges (Also https://www.digitalgov.gov/category/code/)
• Open Source at the American Red Cross: Also see their GitHub.
  • Jim McGowan, Director of Planning and Situational Awareness for the North Central Division of the American Red Cross
  • Red Cross Translations Project
• Humanitarian Free Open Source Software Projects
• OpenCrisis.org
• Bureau of Labor Statistics: Bureau of Labor Statistics invites developers to build employment apps.
• US Aid Grand Challenges
• GeoPlatform.gov: GeoPlatform provides shared and trusted geospatial data, services, and applications for use by the public and by government agencies and partners to meet their mission needs.
• Census API Developers Forum: To improve access to data and encourage innovation, the Census Bureau has begun to provide API access to some data sets. (Also Census.gov)
• Open New York: New York's Open Data Portal, bringing together local, state and federal data in one place. Search the site's datasets by location or subject, or explore featured datasets.
• World-wide Open Government Data - essential elements of open government data, starting with its definition and covering issues from open data portals, applications that use open data, the benefits of open data, open data policy declarations, learning resources and technical assistance resources for open data. The toolkit provides links to many examples of these.
• World Bank Open Data: free and open access to data about development in countries around the globe.
• Data for the public good: From healthcare to finance to emergency response, data holds immense potential to help citizens and government.

Interesting Twitter Feeds:

• @usdatagov
• @ChallengeGov
• @Digital_Gov
• @MapGive
• @GWOBORG
• @humdata
• @SBTaskForce
• @Digihums