feb 23, 2012 -
I came back from my vacation to find out the City Council app has hopped over the $2000 mark! Almost halfway there in a week!
The name of the app has been officially decided, and it's... Open Council. Open data advocate Aaron McGowan has generously offered his domain name and free hosting to the cause! Thanks, Aaron!
I spent a portion of my vacation brainstorming the app, and coming up with some preliminary mobile wireframes. Here's a sneek peek:
We've been mentioned on Twitter by @remarkk, an Open Data guy in Toronto! Also, there's an article in the London Community News, with a picture of me playing with a fancy macbook that's not mine.
Thanks again to everyone who is supporting this project!
feb 16, 2012 -
I've started to wireframe out how the Keeping an Eye on City Council (new name coming soon) app will work. I'll post screenshots soon.
The most interesting challenge will be having the software cleverly determine what data coming in is correct and what is an outlier. I don't want to give the software too much power to make these decisions - it will be more likely a flag ("Is this correct? Click here to verify" / "Is this incorrect? Click here to fix") system, where citizens can curate the data, and trolls and spammers get blocked very quickly.
We're at $1,760 this morning (over 35% of our goal!), and IndieGoGo founder Slava Ruben tweeted about us! I'm excited to see what comes of that.
nik Harron has offered to do our logo for free, in addition to his contribution! That will allow more of the funds to be used for development. Very exciting!
I had interviews yesterday with two local newspapers. I'll post links to the articles when they are live.
Thanks to all who are spreading the word about this project and a special thanks to all who have contributed. It's because of you that this project will succeed!
feb 15, 2012 -
Keeping an Eye on City Council has been received very well! We had 7% of our goal by the time I went home, and I woke up this morning to $1200 - 24% of our goal!
My favourite thing about this project is that it is independant of how the city runs things. It won't pull in data automatically from a feed from the city, which means that any city can benefit from it. How well the app works is totally dependant on the quality of the data inputted by people attending council meetings.
I'm hoping to chat with the councillors soon who have been "live-tweeting" council proceedings. I'd like to build an interface that is better suited to recording bite-sized (no pun intended) pieces of data from multiple people, determining accuracy based on the number of people inputting similar data, and presenting it immediately. Live-tweeting votes at last week's council meeting was a bit awkward, and probably very painful for the people doing so on their smartphone.
feb 14 ♥, 2012 -
I want an app that lets me keep track of how my councillor voted in each council meeting. Something like open parliament, but on the municipal level. Also, it should help me figure out who my councillor is, and how to contact them. It should also have some quality templates for messages to my councillor.
I looked into automating something like this. I was going to pull information from the city council meeting minutes (which until recently were provided in nifty PDF files that look like bad scans of printouts...) The problem is that the format changes often and the language is not easy to read. Also, it takes forever for them to upload the minutes after a council meeting.
The alternative is to crowdsource the data entry. There are a few engaged citizens that attend every council meeting, and look through council meeting minutes. An intuitive interface for citizens to manually enter any amount of data that they want can be the foundation of this app.
When you report the happenings in city council before the minutes are released, you are sticking it to the man!
Let's do this.
This is potentially an expensive endeavour. I've set up an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign to help with costs! If you want to contribute financially to this app, check it out! Also, be sure to spread the word!
feb 13, 2012 -
The other day I did something that I have only really done once before. I spent money on a video game, for myself. The only other time that this has happened was two years ago when I got Minecraft.
The game I bought hasn't been built yet, and may never actually get completed - it's Double Fine Adventure on Kickstarter. Why would someone pay for a game before it's ready, and why would someone pay for something that isn't guaranteed to come to fruition?
I don't know. I've been thinking about it a lot. I know I basically paid $15 to watch a funny video of Tim Schafer being goofy. But that's not it either - I watched the video first, then shelled out $15.
I guess I paid $15 for a game to bypass publishers. I feel like I'm supporting indie developers and sticking it to the man.
I'm trying to analyze why I backed this project because I want to start my own crowdfunded project, and I want to know what makes people spend money on things like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo projects. I want my campaign to be one of those campaigns that meets its goal in 8 hours, and over a million in 24 hours!
Crowdfunding. So cool.
feb 12, 2012 -
City Council voted to cut a bunch of expenses out of the city budget the other day. I suspect they did it to maintain Joe Fontana's successful campaign promise of a 0% tax increase for Londoners. Here are some opinions on the matter.
For fun, before this happened, I made the Adds and Cuts Tax Impact Calculator, which I intended to illustrate how little any proposed adds and cuts actually affects each Londoner's taxes. This was after our team created the budget app game Do-It-Yourself London, and I was unimpressed with how little you can affect city taxes by approving or rejecting propsed adds and cuts.
It turns out the more drastic cuts were announced after the game was created.
@zoster created Make The Cut London, a derivative of our budget game that uses information from the recent council meeting, including how each councillor voted. You should really check it out, and if your counciller voted differently than you would, you can contact them.
Webhead, hacker, igniter, father.