Ideas for CivicCode Hackfest

[Max Ogden]

Hey all -- great discussion last night. The room had a really good
overall enthusiasm.

Register (free!) for the civicode hackfest next thursday night:
http://civicapps.eventbrite.com/

I would like to collect open source civicapps related projects in this
thread. Here are some of the projects that need hacking on:

* Setting up a pubic redmine instance to track bugs and suggestions
between the city and it's open source contributors. Rick has a private
redmine instance that he can export data out of and into the new one

* Collaborating with me on PDXAPI.com to automate the conversion of
shapefiles released by the city into other consumable formats, and
also to build a wiki style datastore for portland data from everyone

* Building client level applications (e.g. smartphone/googlemaps
mashups) for interacting and editing the data in interesting ways

If you have an idea on something you would like to work on next
thursday night, post away!

[Lokkju Brennr]

My primary goal right now is an easy to use and edit, central, master
list of downloadable datasets. I see two primary choices for this:
- central YAML (or other config format) file, hosted on a wiki.
- web app that allows you to manage and export the list in different formats.

Any preferences, or pro/cons?

Loki

[Max Ogden]

Nick -

I took the YAML file that you created here http://pyod.googlecode.com/hg/datasets/pdx.yaml

and edited it to add the column names from each dataset here:

http://github.com/maxogden/PDXAPI/blob/master/datasets.yml

I think we should host the files on any version control site a la gcode or github

I would be happy to work on an easy to use data synchronization device, be it the python data installer that you wrote or anything else

max

[Lokkju Brennr]

I'm improving the python data installer portion to support column name
remapping (some of the column names suck), specification of the
primary key(s), and database agnostic support.

The major steps are:
- refactoring the yaml file specification (already done, but not
documented see below for example)
- modifying the script to accept more commands - for seeing what has
been updated, etc
- using custom shapefile parser instead of spatialite's virtual table support
- switching to using SQLAlchemy
- writing code to handle spatial initialization and typing for
postgis (since there is no decent postgis shapefile tool, and no easy
way to go from spatialite to postgis)

Loki

New YAML spec sample - could use help writing a YAML schema def document for it:
-----------------------------------
capital-improvement-projects:
archive_uri: http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/file/data/CIP_Data_pdx.zip
included_tables:
- file: PortlandCIP\CIP_Points_pdx
type: shp
geom: POINT
table: capital_improvement_projects_point
primary_key: a
columns:
a: "a"
b: "b"
c: "c"