#Hack4HamOnt project thread

[Joey Coleman]

The following are some of the projects Open Hamilton is working on during #Hack4HamOnt. Please add your own suggestions in this thread or speak to them on December 1st during the opening event.

 

One of Open Hamilton's focuses is data standardization and the creation of open source frameworks to enable other open data movements and municipalities to use our work to improve their cities as well.

 

• GRAF – the General Recreation Activity Feed specification. (http://
  www.openhamilton.ca/graf/) A framework and specification for presenting recreational
  activity data. The framework will focus on visualization of the data including mapping
  and display of recreational facilities statuses such as field, pool, and weather conditions.
  We also plan to include information about unexpected closures that is flexible such that it
  can report on specific soccer field closures for example. This is an extension of the Dowsing project.
• Adopt a Fire Hydrant - Winter is approaching and that means snow. Snow buries fire hydrants and the Fire Department travels along Hamilton's streets checking to make sure snow is removed. Open Hamilton wishes to adopt and modify Code for America's Adopt a Hydrant idea to assist our local fire departments in keeping hydrants clear. Our app will allow people to adopt a hydrant using a web interface or mobile app on their smartphone. Each time it snows, the app will kindly remind individuals their hydrant needs clearing and confirm if they are able to clear the hydrant. If they are not, a request for a "foster parent" will be sent to other nearby adopters. Once clear, people will update their status. The Fire Department will be able to get real-time information about locations in which the snow status of hydrants is unknown. This will allow the Fire Department to move effectively deploy their resources to clear hydrants. It's just one small way we can give back to the men and women who risk their lives for us.
• A new City of Hamilton website powered using open source Drupal - released as a distribution for other cities to use; Open Hamilton wishes to build a new citizen powered website to replace the currently outdated embarassing hamilton.ca based upon the concept of Open Public (http://openpublicapp.com/) with a focus on local neighbourhoods.
  There will be three distributions – one “vanilla” distribution provided for cities with internal development resources to customize their site, a “out-of-the-box” solution for cities without internal resources for development. The goal is to create a site that citizens can maintain and make responsive to local needs. We cannot tolerate a city website that turns away investment, which turns away visitors, and makes our city seem populated by digital cavemen.
  We'll do simple things like make bus schedules available in mobile friendly formats. At present, you can't access bus schedules from most smartphones as they are old-style PDFs. We'll do complex things such as adding GeoIP capabilities to the site to allow for customized homepages based upon the locations of the computer accessing hamilton.ca - if you're in Ancaster, you'll get a page focused on your community, if you're visiting from overseas, you'll receive a page of information about Hamilton and the option to translate to your country's language.
  We'll go from the worst city website to the best.
• City guide for web and other mobile platforms – similar to VanGuide with modules for datasets. The creation of a mobile app that allows for the download of open data based modules for displaying information about happenings and events in a city. The goal is to create a framework for event/location/information data that is modular and able to plug into native apps for various platforms. This will make it easier for data organisers to create datasets that can easily be widely adopted.
• Hamilton Restaurant Inspection Data - Gavin, one of our members, is scraping all the restaurant inspectation data posted by Hamilton Public Health and making it available in the OH datastore for use in #Hack4HamOnt. Let's do something amazing with this data to better inform our fellow citizens of the safest and not-so-safe places to eat.

PLEASE ADD YOUR IDEAS TO THIS THREAD. Let's be ambitious together!

[ntomkin]

http://blog.jgc.org/2012/03/ambient-bus-arrival-monitor-from-hacked.html