A few years ago, I heard a little advice on youtube that helped me a lot:

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle. ... Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

- Steve Jobs

Since 2009, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) has released transit schedules, fare information and route shape files in the form of Google's General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). This data has been used by developers to create all sorts of commuter tools and fun visualizations.

I'm interested in working on a few different civic related projects that require or could benefit from an easy to use web API for transit data. As a standard, the GTFS format is great because it gives organizations a fairly clear and low tech (GTFS files are just CSV data with some identifying fields that establish relationships between files) way of uploading the usually complicated model that is a transit system. However, out of the box, GTFS files require some massaging before they are immediately useful for most web applications.

I just created a GeoDjango project called GTFsnap that helps get data out of the CSV files and into a web service that can serve back geojson shapes for transit lines. It's a pretty straightforward solution that parses the GTFS CSV files into GeoDjango, PostGIS, geospatial db tables so that the data can be served as geojson using the vectorformats module for Python. In the project, I've also included a demo of what can be done with the data using OpenLayers. You can see the whole project hosted at geopher.net. GTFsnap will work for any city's GTFS data so I'd like to make geopher.net a good repo for as much GTFS data as I can load.

This summer, I had the pleasure of attending two of GAFFTA's Summer of Smart hackathon events in San Francisco. In June, I helped a team create the beginnings of an interactive game that could eventually be used to help citizens and elected officials communicate about the contentious issue of taxes. Last week, I supported a team remotely to help bootstrap the public unveiling of Guerilla Grafters' concept site that will help the group catalog and manage "modified" trees in San Francisco. The first project was completely ad-hoc; developed entirely at the event itself. The Guerilla Grafters project, on the other hand, has been in existence for several months now and we entered the competition specifically to take advantage of the ability to turboboost the (all volunteer) development work.

There is currently a discussion about the sustainability and usefulness of the products that come out of events like weekend hackathons. While I completely agree that having a high percentage of applications that live on past hackathon awards ceremonies is a noble goal, I also think that we should not overlook the benefits of simply coming together and sharing ideas, hacking and having fun. Most of us get to spend at least five days per week focusing on being hyper productive, dealing with contraints imposed by budgets and management, following best practices, and using the "correct" development language. Hackathons (government oriented or otherwise) offer developers an opportunity to build relationships with other people and try new ideas without necessarily worrying about how what they are working on will exist tomorrow. We might not be able to easily quantify the benefit of this type of activity. However, I can say that these events have helped me to to identify what type of work I want to focus on, become a better, more informed developer, and make new friends. These benefits will help me create better software for the organizations I work for. And, I have a feeling that I'm not the only person experiencing this positive effect.

In short, I believe that there is room in this world for two varieties of application generating events. One would look a lot like what we've seen already with a focus on experimentation, relationship development and fun. The other would impose constraints on developers and live inside a well defined framework in the hopes of generating sustainable output. Interestingly, the GAFFTA organization is already experimenting with a hybrid approach that supports projects in the long term yet also continues to encourage lots of experimentation. So, if you've not yet spent a weekend building something for fun (and maybe, just maybe for the long term) give it a shot! Make something and help figure out how to make hackathon events be as fun, useful and sustainable as possible.

I concluded my OSCON themed week yesterday at an API Hackday event at the awesome Urban Airship offices in (sunny) downtown Portland, OR. Organizations with APIs "shovel ready for hacking" encouraged developers from Portland and around the country to take a shot at creating something innovative in just several, short hours. The event was really well attended - it's smart to do something like this while OSCON is in town!

I really appreciated the sponsors' efforts to get people involved by using their APIs to provide starting points and generate ideas for hacks. This was not a 24 hour event so things had to get moving quickly. The demos of the Simple Geo, SendGrid and Twilio products were particularly impressive to me. My primary focus these days is on government data and innovative systems that use it well. Happily, the eGovPDX team (Portland's very own, dedicated Gov 2.0 initiative) was a sponsor and challenged the participants to build something cool with their new City Council Connect API. The City Council Connect API makes it easy to query for information about Portland City Council meetings and, perhaps most importantly, the voting records of the Mayor and commissioners who attended those meetings.

After spending some time to familiarize myself with the dataset (with a lot of help from the eGovPDX team), I decided my concept would be "visualizations to aid understanding". The value of data that the City Council API exposes might not always be immediately obvious to every potential user. If done properly, visualizations can help introduce people to imposing mountains of data in fun ways. To create my visualizations, I used Python to pull down the JSON data from the eGovPDX web service, parse it, analyze it with the Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK) library for Python and then generate HTML output that utilizes the ProtoVis Javascript package. In such a short amount of time, I was only able to complete a Circle Packing of Yes/No/Abstain votes for issues and a Word Bubble of the top 50 terms used in the titles of issues voted on by City Council members in the last year or so.

You can view the demonstration page that I created for the contest portion of the hackathon here. I will post the Python code used to create these HTML pages on Github soon and post the link back here so check back if you are interested. I'm planning to push this forward a little more and use the above tools and eGovPDX API to create a set of visualization widgets that people will be able to use to keep track of issues and voting records from their desktop or blog. If you have any ideas or want to collaborate please let me know!

I have to thank Rick Nixon and his eGovPDX team for awarding me the "Best Portland City Council Hack" - a $300 Apple gift card! Who says you can't make a buck in this open government data game?

 

photo credit: Andy Lester

I was in Bariloche, Argentina and the surrounding area for about a month earlier this year. It is a beautiful place with towering volcanic peaks and tranquil lakes. It reminded me very much of Colorado. I just got an email from a friend in Bariloche and he mentioned that it has been "un invierno complicado con el volcán Puyehue" - a difficult winter with the volcano.

Since I returned to the states, I've tried to squeeze a little more time out of my days by not monitoring news websites that used to be such a time dump for me. Instead, I follow people on twitter that I trust will do the work for me and let know what's going on. The strategy works pretty well. But, I guess none of the people I follow care very much about South American volcanic activity.

The Puyehue eruption was incredible and it's amazing to see pictures of familiar places covered in ash and sand. Now that I'm staying in volcano country USA, I'm going to pay more attention!


Source: Boston.com

While volunteering this spring at EHRA in Africa, I noticed that the tracking team was collecting a lot of interesting location data on elephants and other desert animals. However, the data is in a silo and not currently utilized very well within or outside of the organization. I just started working on a reusable web solution for showcasing the kind of location data that EHRA keeps. It still needs a lot of polishing, but I think it is an interesting start. Click on the map below to check out an example with actual elephant locations collected by EHRA this year.

Welcome to the new, custom blogging solution I've created with python and django!