Seeking Testers for Citygram-NYC, a notification service for NYC Open Data

[Chris Whong]

Hi BetaNYC Devs,

At the CFA summit, this year's fellowship team for Charlotte showed off an app called Citygram.  It quite simply allows you to subscribe to updates from Open Datasets that contain records in your area.

For example, you can ask to be notified of all 311 complaints within 1/4 mile of your house, and it will send you SMS messages as they appear in the database, or send you a weekly digest email.  

We've forked citygram and are setting it up for NYC.  Right now, we've added 311 and NYPD collisions as datasets you can subscribe to.

http://citygram-nyc.herokuapp.com

I am looking for some folks to test citygram-nyc over the next 10 days or so.  If you're willing, and ready to risk getting lots of SMS messages, use the link above to subscribe!

(nyc updates both of these datasets once per day, so you'll end up getting all of the day's updates at once.)

I'll follow-up sometime next week to start a feedback discussion so you can tell us how your experience was.  Thanks!

-Chris

[Steven Romalewski]

Just signed up.  Looks neat!  Looking forward to checking it out and providing feedback.

Steve

[Mark Topping]

I've just signed up as well. Nice work on the reg UX.

On Monday, October 6, 2014 6:01:23 PM UTC-4, chris.m.whong wrote:

[Chris Whong]

Credit belongs to the cfa fellows that built it, all we (betanyc) did was swap out images and get it running on heroku!  Open source FTW.

Btw,  sync with the data sources is set for 8am, so you should start seeing new SMS messages tomorrow morning.

-C

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[Frank Hebbert]

Wow, getting a lot of text messages.

I wonder if the CityGram approach is maybe not helpful for common items like 311 and crashes, and better for relatively rare issues -- restaurant inspections, building permits, etc. 

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Frank Hebbert
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[Chris Whong]

Yeah, I am thinking a good rule of thumb should be sms is only good for sub-daily feeds.  Email digest is probably a lot better for 311 updates.

thanks for the feedback!

-C

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[Ariel Kennan]

Yeah, when I got my email digest this morning I was really glad that I didn't sign up for SMS as I have a neighbor a few blocks away who is apparently very unhappy with their landlord. Interesting to know, but much better in an email digest!

Ariel Kennan
2013 Code for America Fellow
ari...@codeforamerica.org
@arielmai

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[Frank Hebbert]

Within the denser parts of NYC, the 1/4 mile radius returns a lot of activity -- maybe there's an event smaller radius, like 600 feet? Even with email it's a lot of 311 to look at. 

For electeds/community orgs, this still doesn't solve the need for dashboard/trend tools. I know that's not the design intent, but I was hopeful it would help. 

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[Ariel Kennan]

I'm sure the Citygram team would love to see that feature request on their Github! And probably would love it even more if some civic hackers in NYC or elsewhere would build it :) 

https://github.com/codeforamerica/citygram

That said, I think this would still be very useful to electeds/community orgs, as it's about the friendliest packaging of 311 cases I've seen. 

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[Chris Whong]

There is plenty we could do to enhance the digests with visuals... it could be a weekly report with maps and charts, etc. 

+1 we should build it and pull request back to the main project.

-C

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[Chris Whong]

Holy text messages, Batman!

Frank, I am told that earlier iterations of citygram allowed you to define an arbitrary polygon to receive updates within. 

I think this was too difficult in user testing so they opted for radii instead.  I am going to work on adding in a 1/8 mile radius and an even smaller one. 

-Chris

[Chris Whong]

Added 1/10 mile radius option to citygram this evening.  

Frank added an issue to the main citygram repo, the CFA team made the change within hours.  OSS FTW!

SMS unsubscribes aren't working quite yet, so I deleted ALL SMS subscriptions.

Please re-subscribe if you would like to continue receiving daily sms pushes at 8am EST.

-Chris