Tag: BetaNYC

Launching [BetaNYC-Dev]

Launching [BetaNYC-Dev]

betanyc:

Over the last year, BetaNYC started hosting hacknights to empower the civic hacker community. In that time, we heard quite a bit of feedback from developers on demystifying datasets and government practice. Yet, we  struggled to find the right away to connect developers, designers, and data scientist to each other.

After some feedback, we are launching a developers forum. Without putting on too many rules, the developer’s forum is where you go to get tough questions answered and have much longer conversations on technology solutions, data, etc… Consider it a 24/7 hacknight.

You can join BetaNYC’s developers forum at http://bit.ly/betanyc-dev

GO FORTH AND HACK!

– BetaNYC Leadership

Swiss Car, Bike, and Pedestrian Crash Map – Schweizer Unfallkarte

Swiss Car, Bike, and Pedestrian Crash Map – Schweizer Unfallkarte

Don’t get me wrong, this map is a great first start! While it is painful to understand that this map is a manifestation of lost lives and property, maps like this enable to turn software and data into dialogue to improve OUR STREETS.

BetaNYC’s testimony to the NYC City Council is exemplified in this map.

FIRST, if you use this map as a baseline to NYC’s crash map, it wouldn’t be possible to get down to the actual incident.

SECOND, you wouldn’t have the ability to see where on the road crashes happen.

THIRD, this data isn’t provided in realtime and must be refreshed by hand.

FOURTH, the data is “licensed” and is not available to third parties nor other developers to combine into more useful systems.

Kudos to the developers and liberators. You’ve given NYC a base point for discussion. 

About the map.

The Swiss Crashmap is based on the accident register of the federal office for roads ASTRA. It contains all the 108’640 accidents registered by the police in 2011 and 2012 involving at least one vehicle. The data was collected by the police on the ground and anonymized by ASTRA.
The overview-mode only shows the black spots. By zooming in to street-level, the details of the different accidents are revealed. The causes of the accidents are deactivated in the detail-mode for legal reasons.

The map was created by the Swiss newspapers SonntagsZeitung, Tages-Anzeiger and Le Matin Dimanche in collaboration with the Resarch Centre Sotomo of the University of Zurich. The data is licensed by ASTRA and may not be used by third parties without agreement

#betaNYC: The fate of Open Government in New York City

#betaNYC: The fate of Open Government in New York City

What if you had a thriving Open Government / Civic Tech community and somehow a Chief Executive or Legislative body did not want to continue its investment? 

In 2011, Washington DC’s mayoral turnover significantly impacted the local Open Government and Civic Technology community. Last fall, many wondered what would happen to the future of Federal Open Government initiatives if the Presidency changed hands. After the November 2012 elections, the same consternation entered my head. What if the next Mayor of New York City did not care about the technology community, open government, and the future of a digital city?

From BetaNYC:
It has been six hot months since we changed our name. In that time, we’ve been ironing out an update to our Purpose, Values, Goals, Mission, and Tools.

For now, this is the language we are working with. If you would like to add your comments or tweaks, visit our GitHub and comment away.

#betaNYC, a Code for America Brigade: Some BetaNYC housekeeping – Purpose, Values, Goals, Mission, and Tools 

Visualizing NYC’s OpenData

Chris M Whong, BetaNYC’s co-Captian, visualized the 1100+ open datasets made available by New York City. This is a force-directed graph generated with the charting library d3.js. NYC’s open data portal runs on the Socrata platform*, and this visualization was created using the “dataset of datasets” and the Socrata Open Data API (SODA).

Chris writes “Why? The point is to show the scale of the portal, and to illustrate which datasets have user-created views. In the future, it would be great to dynamically size the circles by the popularity of the datasets.”

* Chris is employed by Socrata
** GitHub Link

Weiner’s campaign calls for technology advances that we already have

Normally, I would keep my mouth shut about the Mayoral campaign’s talking points, but when they are so willfully un-researched, I have to point them out. Yesterday, Anthony Wiener’s campaign announced 61 additional ideas to keep New York the Capital of the Middle Class.
I’d like to point out one…
112 – Make 311 a ‘Big Data’ Treasure Trove 
“Our 311 city help hotline has fielded over 158 million calls in the past decade. The data about the types of calls and the locations from which they are made are closely- held secrets by the city. This information should be released in raw form. Obviously we would remove any personal information, but giving the public and city workers access to the data might yield effective mapping, trend-spotting, and innovative solutions.”
THESE ARE NOT SECRETS. Since March 7, 2012, the City has had one of the most transformative open data laws. Almost since its inception, NYC DoITT has been publishing 311 requests to the City’s Open Data portal. You can access near realtime calls via NYC 311 map (developed by DoITT), follow them on twitter, or even use an Open311 inquiry API to access NYC’s 311. Want to look at 311 data since 2010, visit < nyc.gov/data >.
If any candidate wants to attend any of our hacknights, we’d love to talk about what should be opened… Beyond PLUTO, there are many more datasets we would like to see.