Project Brief: To develop an interactive mapping platform that would overlay municipal apartment inspection data with user & organizational contributed data with the goal of growing the number of low income tenants involved in campaigns for fair housing.
The project will utilize the Municipal Licensing and Standards Open Data set, evaluate and utilize a mapping platform and hopefully include SMS contributed data.
Problem/Objectives
1. Inspections
2. Work orders placed
3. Work done
Potential Solution
The solution we put forward was to extract the (limited) information that is available through the City's Open Data initiative, convert it to a useable format and display each record on it's own page/section. We would then plot the records that we are able to (given adequate address information) on to a map and allow filtering of what is displayed – each of the three points above or combinations of them.
Due to the fact that the dataset is somewhat limited, the second portion of the solution we put forward was to augment this data set with user contributed data. This will bey a key part in helping ACORN achieve their objectives, as providing an insight into what needs to be done, and clearly isn't, can serve as a sort of embarrassment for the city. More so if/when paired with an awareness campaign that directs people to the site to get a better idea of how bad the housing situation is.
Hopefully this has the intended affect of more people bringing the issue to the attention of city officials and subsequently getting more inspections and work orders done.
Potential Technologies:
For front end code I'll more than likely be using Twitter's Bootstrap framework as it should make things pretty quick.
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
Getting data from users can obviously range from geo-encoding photos from smartphones to submitting data through a web-form that we provide on the site so we'll need to work out who can achieve what in the time we have and also offer solutions ACORN could explore at a later date.
If SMS is an option then Twillo is all the rage (understandably) http://www.twilio.com/
Potential Approach:
1. We need to get the data into something usable/queryable 2. Build map web page 3. build pages for locations ex. 123 King St, page would have all the data relevant for that address, hopefully linked from the map and searchable from interface and indexable by google 4.Get user submitted content through SMS, or email or whatever 5. Attach user content to the map 6. attach user content to the pages for addresses 7. get some sort of management interface for each of the pieces especially for managing user submissions 8. get the whole thing running somewhere