Brigade Apps, What Ryan and I are doing, Chromebook Loaners

[Shawn Looker]

tl:dr; We have projects to work on.  The new schedule is as follows: meeting, week off, hack night, week off, repeat.  We have chromebooks to borrow on hack nights.

Hey Guys,

We chatted last night at the hack night planning and we came up with two apps that we are interested in working on as a brigade.  

Apps!

1.  Fifi and Findo

This was a civic hackathon winner last year but never went live.  This lets you post that you lost a dog or  found a lost dog and it connects with the national database to help you find your dog or locate the owner.  It also lets you see animal shelters nearby that have adoptable animals.  

One of the things we plan on doing with this is talking to the 5 large animal shelters to figure out why they aren't all on that system, and to see what we can do to help get them on that system.

2. Adopt a Drain - Storm drain adoption and mapping flood areas.  We are going to try and get the community to adopt a storm drain and keep an eye on it to report anytime it may be clogged which can lead to excessive flooding.  There is currently a site up to report a clogged storm drain here:

http://gustfront.ccrfcd.org/rfcdemail/rfcdemail.aspx?CX=General%20Questions

The sensor data lookup url is here:

http://www.ccrfcd.org/sensordata.htm

Station Data:

http://gustfront.ccrfcd.org/station/station2.asp

Better sensor data:

http://bulls.ccrfcd.org/showdata.html

Please let me know if you have any questions.  We're going to start planning on meetings every other Wednesday, with us alternating the meetings between a general meeting and a hack night.  If the general meeting doesn't have a lot to go over, we may hack some at those meetings as well.

What Ryan and I are doing

Ryan is still leading the KEEN initiative from the Brigade side to work on teaching robotics to kids at Clark High School.  We still could use a few people who are willing to volunteer time to help out in mentoring some of the students that may have questions or need help getting their bots together.  We'd both be happy to run people through setting one up and showing how they work so you won't go in blind.

Ryan and I are also going to get Jodi connected with Brandy who is the gatekeeper of the parking data.  We are going to tell her that we have people that are interested in working on the Food Trucks app ( http://lasvegasnevada.gov/foodtruck/ ) if we can get access to more parking data.

Last but not least, we have National Day of Civic Hacking coming up in June (no date yet).  We want to make this a bigger event than last year if possible.  Last year we had 16 teams with 52 people and a huge amount of city participation.  It would be great if we can get some media coverage both via social media and more traditional media if possible, and we should start getting our plan started now.

Chromebook Loaners

As some of you saw last night, we have chromebooks to loan out for the night at hack nights for anyone who may not have a laptop to use.  They aren't the fastest machines, but I've developed on them using online services like Cloud 9 ( http://c9.io ) or Code Envy ( http://codeenvy.com ) and they definitely work pretty well.  

If you have any questions, please let me know!

shawn