Live Police and Fire Scanner API

[Dan Magnuszewski]

Found a feed for real time police and fire scanner information.

http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/API

It looks like we'd have to sign up for their "Premium Services" which is $30/year.

http://www.radioreference.com/apps/subscription/

-Dan

[Ryan]

Dan,

Good links. I've added them to http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/Government_data_catalogs.
One of the challenges of distributed and open-source development is
the development of small silos of good data, information, and code.
This is sorta a 'meta-conversation' in itself, but I'm interested to
see how open gov groups can maintain individual focus on regions, but
still push contributions to shared resources, which serve to push the
whole field forward. This concept is analogous to maintaining several
forks of a project, as opposed to pushing back to the main branch.
For example, there is Open San Diego, a Gov2.0 meetup group in SF,
another in Phoenix, and I'm working on Open Solano (CA) and moderating
e-Democracy.org's LocalLabs group. We can certainly develop our own
assets and such, but per the conversations we had about developing a
platform, it may make sense to start fleshing out that concept to see
how something could be leveraged across locations.

To the rest of the group - Hi, I'm Ryan Wold. I met Dan at Capitol
Camp last week. I'm currently at Sunlight Labs, but headed back to CA
soon. I'm focused on transparency at the local level (city/county/
special districts). I'm a part-time ruby developer and full-time
administrator, interested in workflow, civic engagement, and more
sustainable government. I recently founded MoreQuality.org, a
nonprofit designed to work on local issues. I look forward to
exploring the uncharted territories of local transparency with you
all. I'm @randw on twitter, and 'afomi' on IRC and Github.

[Dan Magnuszewski]

Ryan,

Our goal is to be able to aggregate all these silo'd (what's the plural of silo) data sources and provide a uniform API to access them so that having other sites integrate with us becomes fairly trivial. I'm sure someday down the road, the Open State Project (or some other project) would like to incorporate our data. I hope to build our platform in such a way that other counties/municipalities can use it as well. This would lower the effort needed by reusing a lot of the code we write and only need to worry about creating parsers for their custom data sources.

Have a safe trip back to CA!

-Dan