Sunday's meeting and a suggested roadmap

[steevithak]

Good meeting Sunday, thanks to everyone who came out and thanks to Randy for organizing it! It was my first time to meet several of you. 

So the big question I think we came away with from the meeting was, how do we move beyond social meetups to actually doing some civic hacking. Here's my take on where we need to go. My feeling is that this group needs to act as a coordination entity. DFW is a huge area with dozens of counties and hundreds of cities. Let's put together the resources that will help our existing civic hacking groups find each other, work together, and plan regional events. 

Here's a short list of what I think is needed to accomplish that:

1. Establish a mediawiki site for our own coordination and planning efforts

2. Establish a public website where we can deploy region-wide civic applications

3. Deploy Open Data Catalog (ODC) software on the public site

4. Ask groups to begin cataloging data sources in their cities/counties

We need hosting. We have at least two 501(c)(3) groups involved under whose umbrella we could accept donations of hosting or servers (Dallas Makerspace and shortly the Tarrant Makers group). Worst case, Dreamhost offers free hosting services to non-profits, but I'd like to see a local hosting company get involved and offer us a couple of colo CentOS or RHEL GNU/Linux servers.

We need domain names for items #1 and #2. Based on my experiences with other group projects, the domains need to be free of single points of failure, where the loss of one person endangers the project. A rule we've instituted in other groups I work with is that control of any critical element like a domain name must always be shared with at least two entities (e.g. two people or two organizations). This prevents loss of the domain if any one person stops participating. The other important criteria is that public facing domains need to be easy to understand and spell. A couple of names came up at the meeting as potential candidates: 

 - datalibredfw.org - this is a good candidate for #1. I think it's a little long and the meaning unclear for the general public, so probably not a good choice for the public facing site. But it would work great for our wiki. I understood there are some ownership issues with the domain at present that make it uncertain if we can use it.

 - opendfw.org - this might be a good candidate for #2, it's easy to understand and spell. At present the domain is privately owned and in use hosting other websites. We talked a little about the possiblity of using it. 

If anyone else has a potential domain that could be donated for use, or a suggested domain we could register, let us know! 

Open Data Catalog is a free (MIT license) web-based software package for cataloging the location of public data sources including data sets, applications, and APIs. It was developed by civic hackers in Philadelphia. Note that there was some discussion at Sunday's meeting about a data warehousing service - Open Data Catalog is strictly a directory, it does not replicate or store any data itself. I think cataloging is safer start until we have some idea of how many sources exist. I've talked to the authors of Open Data Catalog and they think it should work as-is for a large metropolitan area like ours, however, they suggested improvements would be needed to the search capabilities in order to restrict search results to a particular city or county. 

-Steve