Madison and Dane County Civic Hacking in 2017

[Erik Paulson]

Friends --

A very Happy New Year to you all!

I wanted to share a few thoughts and some plans for 2017.  This is kind of a long message, so I broke it up into some parts: Background, A Plan, and a Demo.

Background

First, I assume many of you saw them, but during 2016 the Cap Times devoted some space to Civic Hacking. I don't like their framing as "Civic Hacking is Dead", but the CapTimes doesn't have an axe to grind with civic hacking so I don't read it as anything malicious. There were two pieces in particular, a cover story about a year ago and a followup towards the end of the year:

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/error-why-are-madison-s-open-data-and-civic-hacking/article_a25a8ffd-0afd-5016-ac6f-305b2217d2c3.html

http://host.madison.com/ct/business/technology/as-the-city-revamps-open-data-future-of-civic-hacking/article_2ff2805e-346f-5c14-9ebf-9c3a6094618b.html

So, under the theory of any publicity is good publicity, it was at least good to see coverage. (I also think they tried to do us a bit of a favor by putting a bit of heat on the City.)

There are some other positives I wanted to highlight as well - there's been a core group of people working on the OpenElections results data project that are making good progress, we had some folks come onto the Hacking Madison Google group to show off their projects, and Greg Tracy did a pretty major upgrade to the Transit API when the city changed its backend, and it went off without really anyone noticing. (And in a very encouraging sign, Metro reached out to Greg in advance so he could be ready.) The Meetup group has had good growth in people joining even without a regular cadence of meetings, so this message will reach a wider audience.

There are some other things happening in the City and County in 2017 that are related to Civic Hacking that are of interest.

First, as covered in the 2nd CapTimes story, Madison is joining the Bloomberg Philanthropy's  'What Works Cities':

https://whatworkscities.bloomberg.org/cities/

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/madison-partners-with-national-initiative-to-improve-data-use/article_00425d18-7b93-5bc7-b100-ca9863cbc9b7.html 

The City's plans are to work on two projects - 'Open Data' and 'Performance Management' - there's a presentation link in the material here:
https://madison.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=A&ID=512986&GUID=D695FC69-4549-4CF4-ABB3-E9EA8164394A

The Open Data project is a "reboot" of the Open Data ordinance and a new commitment to getting datasets online. 

I suspect the overall focus here is on internal metrics and less about apps or other more interactive use-cases, and that the audience is more city staff than the public, but it's possible that we'll see some outcomes/improvements that are directly applicable to civic hacking. It officially started today and only runs for four months, so I think the message here is "stay tuned."

There is also some interest from Dane County in what we'd call Civic Hacking, from today's paper:

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/bright-ideas-push-collaboration-between-government-and-tech-sector/article_ee7509c9-ec40-5529-a043-d6644ee7b968.html

A Plan

It is true that our meetups are less regular than typical meetup groups, and we haven't had the "big day" type events in over two years. But, I think that's OK.

We have a challenge in that we typically want to demo our own products for our meetups - the Python group can fall back on "demo a cool library" to fill a month, which has not been something we've historically done. However, showing off a new app someone built once a month is a pretty high bar and is not sustainable. I also don't think as a group, we're got enough folks who are interested in a weekly "hack night"

I think the right approach for Madison is to set aside the usual Code For America playbook until we've built up a more regular group that we can point at and say "this could stand on its own." Until then, I think the plan should be rather than having our own group, we'll use the other groups in town. 

So, maybe rather than having a regular standalone "Civic Hacking" meetup once a month, we'll try to get a couple "Civic Hacking" flavored meetings in the other meetups - if someone's got a Python project to show off, we'll do a joint meeting with MadPy, or if Javascript is someone's bag, MadJS. We can hit up the Design groups and the UX groups, or just one of the generic "Do cool tech stuff" groups. The cross pollination will be good for us all.

Here's what I'd like y'all to do:

1. For Communication, subscribe to at least one of these two options:

A. The Meetup group - communication through this will be largely limited to just announcing the next event, with the occasional message like this one:
https://www.meetup.com/Civic-hacking-Madison/

-and/or-

B. Please join the 'Hacking Madison' Google Group - this will be a little more discussion-oriented, but we'll make sure that the meetups get announced there too.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/hackingmadison

2. If you're working on a civic project or you'd like to work on something, either tell folks in the Google group, or if you're not quite ready to talk about it, drop me a note and let's see what we can do. 

We'll start talking with some of the other groups and get some meetings scheduled in 2017 soon. Watch the channels above for more news.  

Demo

This message is long enough, so for the demo of my Madison&Amazon Echo connection, please see this message in the Google Group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/hackingmadison/uPplNV8WB5M

Thanks for reading this far, and I wish y'all a successful 2017!

-Erik

P.S. - The City's Fiber-to-the-Premise study was finished in November. I have no idea what the next steps are but some of you might find the study interesting:

https://madison.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=4674257&GUID=78C0DFED-BF61-4E6D-9344-5215B3C8FE6C

[Stephen Larrick]

Posting this redundantly, but since the "What Works Cities" project is mentioned here, I wanted to follow up:

As part of the What Works Cities "Open Data" project, the Sunlight Foundation is working with social impact firm Reboot to conduct open data user research for the City of Madison. Far from being about "internal metrics", Sunlight's role in the project is explicitly about external, community use cases for open data.

Our specific line of inquiry is around how open data can better connect to potential users (both technical and non-technical) working to improve Madison's neighborhoods. 

Some of my colleagues leading that research are in town next week and would love to talk to folks from Hacking Madison about the open data program and what could be done to make it more useful for civic hackers. Please message me if you are interested in providing feedback and have availability on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday for a ~hour long semi-structured conversation (happy to buy you coffee/a beer/lunch!).

Feel free to email me at slar...@sunlightfoundation.com and/or call me on my cell 978-846-4099 to schedule, or if you have questions.

Thanks!

Stephen