Code for Miami Blog

Calling all designers, developers, and data mashers!

The National Day of Civic Hacking is rapidly approaching! If you haven’t heard of #NDoCH, it’s a yearly hackathon taking place in cities across the United States using technology for good. This year’s day of action will take place on June 6th, and today we’re excited to announce the first statewide challenge in Florida’s history and invite you to help us #hackforchange.

In an effort to make the state’s vendor payment data more easily digestible and meaningful to taxpayers and citizens, in collaboration with our CFO Jeff Atwater, six years (2009-2014) of vendor payment data will now be made available for download. With this data, we’re asking technologists, designers, data visualizers, and anyone interested in exploring for potential insights to go forth and query. Play with the data and make something interesting or informative, creativity is encouraged.

What can you do with this data?

Use tools like fusion tables, D3.js, tableau, plotly, or another open source tool to create an interactive visualization of payments over time. Build an app to help show which vendors contract with state agencies, what type of work is being done, or which areas where state business concentrates. Make an API so other dev can quickly and easily use this data in future projects. Check out guides and tutorials online, and challenge yourself to create something in 24 hours.

This is a pivotal step in our continued effort in promoting  transparency in government through opening data for public use. This statewide challenge is sure to spur further dialogue and intrigue into the benefits of opening data throughout our state.

If you can’t find a National Day of Civic Hacking event happening near you, we invite you to host your own event and hack for change to a city near you. Review the available organizing resources to guide you along and reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

Let us know if you’re in to help us #hackforchange, and we’ll see you on June 6th!

Thanks-

Rebekah Monson and your friends at Code for Miami

_______

About the Florida Vendor Payments data challenge

Proposed Statewide FLDFS Challenge: Statewide Challenge to make the state’s vendor payment data more easily digestible and meaningful to taxpayers and citizens of Florida by creating an interactive and/or visual tool of this data.

About the data:

Provides information about state disbursements to vendors/payees

Data is posted as part of Transparency Florida:  http://www.myfloridacfo.com/Transparency/  

(data can be found under “State Payments” button on Transparency Florida main page)

Main webpage for Vendor Payment data: http://flair.myfloridacfo.com/dispub2/cvphsrch.htm

Searchable Database of these data available at: http://flair.dbf.state.fl.us/dispub2/newvpymt4.shtml

BULK DOWNLOAD:

Bulk downloads of State Vendor Payments data available online for 6 state Fiscal Years (Fiscal Years 2009 – 2014): http://www.myfloridacfo.com/transparency/vendorpayments.aspx

What can be illustrated with this data?

Who we (the State of Florida) pay, for what, and how much

You can Search vendor payments data by:

Warrant #/ Invoice #

Date Range/ Fiscal Year

Object Code Classification(s)

Vendor Name/ Number/ Type

Minority Classification(s)

Paying State Agency(s)

Amount

Written by Maggie Diaz-Vera

Animals in Miami-Dade County shelters are looking for a human to care for them. Code for Miami and Miami Dade Animal Services Department have created a new app, to share animal stories and help find them a new home. The automatic system sends out tweets four times a day with the listings currently on the Animal Services PetHarbor website on Miami Dade Animal Services twitter account, @PetstoLove combined with content written by a staff member. 

With the use of the open source software and public county data, Code for Miami volunteers were able to implement the CutePets application originally created by the Code for America Fellows team in Denver, CO. More than seven million animals enter animal shelters every year in the United States. With the help of simple applications like this that number can be greatly reduced. Any local government can implement their own version of this application by following the steps shown on the Code for America CutePets GitHub page.

The data created by government is paid for and belongs to citizens. Applications built by Code for Miami and other groups/companies rely on this data for insights and functionality. Help make this information easy to access and search by anyone by visiting our site.

Monday, November 3rd was a big day for the Code for Miami group. Besides it being the day before Election Day, we had some big moves going on. 

We had some visitors from the national organization Code for America visiting Miami to meet with Miami-Dade official as Miami has been chosen as a partner city for the Code for America Fellowship Program. That means Miami-Dade Government will be working directly with the selected Fellows "develop civic applications that will strive to improve how people interact with the Regulatory and Economic Resources department."

Speaking of the Code for America Fellowship, our own Ernie Hsiung has been selected as a 2015 Fellow! This means for 2015 Ernie will be based in San Francisco and then the city to which he is assigned to work on civic applications. We congratulate Ernie on this great opportunity and wish him the best of luck! 

Cristina Solana will be the interim Co-Captain of Code for Miami! While Ernie is away, Cristina will help Rebekah in running Code for Miami meetups and events. 

We wish the Best for Ernie and Cristina in their new roles and look forward for what's coming up in 2015 for Code for Miami!

Written by Maggie Diaz-Vera

Our Civic Hacking Brigade is always open to inviting those with ideas on how to create ease in communication with citizens and government. This week, we were joined by a like-minded group, the Cortadito Computer Club (CCC). The name is a play off the Hombrew Computer Club which started in Silicon Valley. The CCC meets monthly to brainstorm and develop ways to get Cuba and its citizens more connected to information and the internet. This group formed shortly after a hackathon which took place in January at the LAB Miami with the same purpose.

Natalia from Roots of Hope, the organization which sponsored the original hackathon, and organizer of the CCC Jose gave us some insights on the complications on Cuba's current issues with connectivity. "Cuba is the least connected country with the lowest internet penetration, including post-earthquake Haiti."

Cortadito Computer Club is in the house at hack night to tell us how we might help hack for Cuba. pic.twitter.com/foNY8JGrts

— Code For Miami (@CodeForMiami)

July 21, 2014

The goal of the Cortadito Computer Club is to circumvent these communication issues using technology within the legal bounds of Cuba. Cuba has a very limited internet connection, where having a 56k connection can only be found a good day. Because of this, the CCC is brainstorming solutions that require little data usage such as text, email, and RSS. 

One of the winners of the January hackathon, Salvi Pascual, joined us to explain his idea. He created an email system in which people n Cuba can send an email with a subject line indicating the type of information they wish to receive, for example the subject line "weather." They would then receive a response from a server that crawls web pages with the information requested, in this case a weekly weather report of Cuba. Salvi says this system is gaining attention and can use assistance in maintaining and developing the platform.

As a civically engaged audience, Code for Miami is a great ally in assisting the Cortadito Computer Club with ideas and projects to help them accomplish their mission. Through the use of mesh networks, text-based or offline communication, we can work together towards providing solutions for some of the tough issues being faced by Cuban citizens.

Every Monday, Code for Miami meets at the Lab Miami at 7pm to talk civic hacking and eat some pizza. However this past week stood out from the ordinary Monday routine. We had a very special guest, Commissioner Juan C Zapata, visit our group. We also got to hear from one of our members, Diana Espino, experience at Google I/O and how Google plans to help with civic engagement and open data.

Diana started off the night sharing some tips and tricks she learned while visiting San Francisco for the Google I/O conference. “The purpose of what we do as hackers for good is to make life safer and make society better though our ideas,” Diana shared. One way we can go about hacking for good is utilizing the APIs Google has made available. The Google Civic Data API allows developers “build applications that display civic information.” This is API is currently use in our repMiami project. Another resource to consider is the Google Crisis Map which “aims to put critical disaster-related geographic data in context”. It’s great to see that large companies are making efforts towards creating and establishing open data trends.

Diana offered 3 great tips we should keep in mind as we work on our community projects.

1. Make Open Data more Accessible

Let’s work towards making community data high quality and easier to read and maintain. It is not uncommon to receive important data through PDFs or even faxes! Best practice is to share and create this data as JSON objects.

2. Make Data Interoperable

While our focus is on Miami and South Florida, we want to make this data open so anyone can have access to analyze and interpret! Focus on using standards when obtaining and creating data.

3. Think of these Projects as a Start Up

We have lots of great ideas that flow through our weekly meetings. It’s very possible that there are venture capitalists willing to invest on good ideas and applications that help the community. Keep that in mind as you collaborate with others and develop new projects.

We then had the pleasure of hearing from Commissioner Juan C Zapata in regards to the current issues facing the taxi system and transit in general. He stated his frustration with the county’s current way of dealing with issues through technology. “The current mentality is to protect the status quo,” he shared. We need to spend less time on non-adaptive procedures and focus on incorporating new technologies.

As the commissioner stated, taxis are “the first thing people are exposed to after the airport”. However, the current system in place in regards to taxis has become something of a monopoly. In order to become a taxi service, you need to obtain a medallion which can cost $500,000. Because of the extremely high cost, it becomes difficult for small competitors to obtain these medallions. There are new car-sharing services, such as Uber and Lyft; but Miami-Dade has actually putting legislation into place to stop these companies from being viable transportation options.

With this information given to us, Commissioner Zapata challenged the Code for Miami volunteers to find ways to disrupt the current system and gain feedback from the community on the transportation options currently provided. “We should be a community that is open to adopting new technologies.”

We have a diverse group in today's meet! 

Artists, Health Care Enthusiasts, Animal Rights and Activists against Human Trafficking all come together on working towards solving problems in Miami Dade County and South Florida.

We want to take a moment to say goodbye to one of our core members, Xavier Hayeck. Xavier is moving to San Francisco to start a new journey so we thank him for his efforts and wish him the best of luck!

With that being said, we are still going strong here at Code for Miami! Our brigade Co-Captain, Ernie Hsiung, is looking to apply for Code for Miami Fellowship. Hopefully that means big things going forward for Civic Hacking in South Florida!

Our current projects include working on sending information from RepMiami to Google so we can share information of politicians on the municipal level and do our part towards open data in politics.

We are officially one year old! To celebrate, we invited friends and family to O Cinema in Wynwood to check out some of the projects we have been working on throughout the year.

On this day last year, June 1st, 2013, Ernie Hsiung and Rebekah Monson met at the National Day of Civic Hacking event hosted by Richard Bookman. It actually turned out to be the 2nd largest turnout in the country! To keep the momentum going, Ernie and Rebekah teamed up together to form the Code for Miami brigade. At the first meetup there were about 25 civic volunteers to give ideas and help develop technology to make the community better!

Because of our civic efforts, we have been able to partner with great people like Matt Haggman from The Knight Foundation and Mike Sarasti from Miami Dade County! With their help, we have made great strives towards an Open Data movement in Miami Dade County! Mike has even applied for the very competitive Code for America Fellowship program.

Code for Miami meets weekly at 7PM on Monday nights at the LAB Miami. We have been working on some great projects this year, and we finally had a chance to show them all off in one place.

Adrian Cardenas has been working on the Text My Bus MIA SMS app working with Google's Miami Dade Transit Data allowing commuters to retrieve text-based time updates for bus routes. Ben Manley, a local highschool student, debuted his promotional video for Text My Bus, and it had a great response!

RepMiami is a web project that enables citizens to find their local city and state representatives based on geographical location. This project was originally started by Patrick, a graduate student from FIU. Because he made the application open source, Miguel was able to take the reigns and finish off the project. You can view the RepMiami website here.

For non-developers, there's the ongoing project, MiamiWiki.org . A local wiki site by Miami for Miami. Anyone can edit and add pages onto Miami Wiki. This makes it an ideal informational source for Miami citizens to place content they care about. This project is actually what got Ernie interested in Civic Engagement. Now that he is busy handling Code for Miami captain duties, Maggie Diaz-Vera helps monitor the wiki.

We also had the pleasure to have Rob Davis and Ryan Gates from Code for Fort Lauderdale to demonstrate the Florida Legislature Tracker tool which gives citizens easy accessibility to the bills currently going through government. 

We are so happy to share these projects and others with our community today and celebrate a milestone for our group! With the help of passionate local citizens, we have been helped make Miami better connected and have contributed to the growing Miami technology scene.

We have accomplished so much this year and it's all thanks to the efforts of the volunteers that come to our meetings on Monday nights and those that contribute virtually.

So with that we say Happy Birthday Code for Miami! Let's strive for another great year!

In the interest of getting in on one of the biggest tech events in Miami's history, we held our National Day of Civic Hacking a bit early this year at the eMergeAmericas Hackathon. (Imagine that, Miami was EARLY for something for a change!) Some really cool ideas and new civic hackers came out of the event, and we're excited to continue work on some of the apps prototyped at the hackathon. Here's what they had to say over at the National Day of Civic Hacking blog:

The diversity of participants and their energy was incredible. From university professors to software developers, makers and entrepreneurs came together to work on social challenges relating to topics such as connected neighborhoods, distribution of food and resources at the neighborhood level, political transparency in Latin America and disaster preparedness. Projects were created with all sorts of open source software tools but some also by combining sensors and electronics with software in order to create unique maker-type projects.

We're going to keep celebrating National Day of Civic Hacking throughout the month. Find out how to join in at our National Day of Civic Hacking page, and be sure to tell us how you hacked for change!

At the end of the month, we'll celebrate the official National Day of Civic Hacking weekend and our one-year anniversary(!) with a demo day and party. The event will be on Sunday, June 1 from noon to 2 p.m. at the OCinema courtyard in Wynwood. Just RSVP on the Meetup.  We'll share some food, drinks and birthday cake. Our members will be on hand to talk about what they love about civic hacking and to demo some of the cool things we've built this year.

Every week we manage to get some bright and caring individuals together to work and brainstorm projects to help our community. This meeting, marking the end of the first quarter shows we done a lot of work but there is still so much we can do.

RepMiami is currently in testing stages to see if there are any bugs. But for the most part is complete. Great work, Miguel!

We are currently waiting for some backside development from the county for the Open 311 application. In the meantime, Greg Bloom is currently working on an Open 211 initiative with openreferral.org. This is to direct people to non-government businesses for any services they may require. They are working with Switchboard Miami, Miami's current 211 provider, on how to best make this data open and searchable.

There has been a lot of local and media interest for the bicycle tracking app, 'Dude, Where's My Bike.' We're hoping to get this further into development in the coming weeks.

We had a visit this week from Jase Wilson, brigade captain of Code for Kansas City. Also with us was Rob Davis, brigade captain of Code for Ft. Lauderdale. It's always great to get together and discuss how throughout the country our Code for America brigades are working towards open government.

Heyyyy! @luminopolis is here from #codeforkc tonight! @codeforamerica ❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/LBz8aWmBVz

— Code For Miami (@CodeForMiami) April 1, 2014

Rob is currently working on the Florida Legislation Tracker which will work towards tracking and identifying the latest bills and legislation passed by Florida Lawmakers. Once it is completed, it will help citizens understand and track legislation with issues they find important.

Remember the next two weeks are going to be a little different than our usual meetings. Monday, April 7 our own Adrian Cardenas will present "Learning the Command Line," a beginners talk for folks that want to understand more about the interfaces behind Unix/Unix-like systems and command line utilities. April 14th we will be user testing the text my bus app. There will be two separate testing groups at Dadeland South Station and Government Center Metro Rail Station.

This week was a great meeting and it looks like we are getting close to the finishing steps on some of our great projects. We had a full house tonight which was absolutely wonderful. Here is the news on some of our key projects and where we currently stand.

The Local Business Data Tax Set has been organized thanks to Juan and Emily. Mike Sarsati from Miami Dade County has shown the progress to the City of Miami business tax collector and they were rather impressed by the amount of work in such a short amount of time! Hopefully now they will understand the benefit to making information open! ;D

The new goal with this project is to create a visual map to locate paid vs unpaid taxes by zip code. Let us know if this is something you want to work on!

For Open311, apparently our work was so exceptional, that the code for the main Open311 app is going to be updated to be a little more future-proof for any information that may be submitted later. So while there may be some initial downtime for those improvements, it's great to know that we are moving forward.

TextMyBus testing is going to be on April 14 during our meeting. 2 groups will meet at Government Center and Dadeland South Station and test the sticker design that has been created. Ben Manley has also made a premilnary promotional video for the TextMyBus app. You can download it on this thread. 

We are currently working on creating content for MiamiWiki. Maggie has drafted a stock letter to send to different local interest groups reaching out about local wiki and how they can contribute. Jeremy Roth stopped by with an idea of making a GPS-based Walking App of Miami that will pull information from MiamiWiki to educate locals and tourists of the geographical area they are in. We are currently looking to add historical content about Miami. As well, feel free to add information about your favorite places and what gives Miami it's flavor. Anyone can add to it!

by @robdotd

It isn’t very often that you get the opportunity to brainstorm about the future. You may daydream here and there about it, but do you ever really consider the potential?  How would things be different? What are the steps for us to get there?  And more importantly, who will be involved in creating it?

These were the types of questions posed at the Code for Miami’s Open Data Jam held last Saturday. An afternoon accompanied by group discussions and sticky-note adventures to help us reflect on something very important, the betterment of our community. This event was part of a much larger effort, an international CodeAcross day to unite people of all backgrounds and skillsets to engage each other in the hope of a better future. How do things get better you ask? Information is part of the answer, and our access to it as well as potential uses not currently being explored made the few hours shared together seem like just minutes.

Yenesco “Nesco” Cobain, an FIU student and one of the other attendees in the breakout group on Land Use and Real Estate had much to add. “What if someone could be alerted if they were entering a dangerous area?” he stated. Tourists could certainly use such a service, and that goes for many other areas outside of Miami as well. Another attendee suggested a heatmap of housing information emailed regularly to show new changes and trends, a useful idea for potential buyers or agents on the hunt. Permitting requirements and the need for contractor “ratings” were also brought up, a practical tool for that could be used vetting qualified and responsible builders.

Ideas blended, borrowing bits and pieces from each other, and grew into unique and actionable items. It was a humbling experience to see citizens (once called “strangers”) largely from different parts of South Florida come together for a common good. We live in these places together, shouldn’t we talk about our experiences too? Although my one regret is that I couldn’t be in two places at once, as I certainly would have enjoyed hearing the other breakout group’s suggestions. Public transportation, campaign finance, transparency in local elections, our wonderful parks, improved walkability, and the need for more “open hearts” made that afternoon time well spent. If you want to contribute to the conversation, join us on Monday night, 7pm at The Lab Miami. Everyone is welcome.

Tomorrow, we will be our hosting our first, Open Data Jam at The Light Box. This is really exciting because this is our chance to show local officials we are serious about data transparency in our government.

Open Data is the idea that government (local, national, or international) should allow individuals access to certain types of data. If this information was open, citizens would be able to better understand what is going on and how they can contribute. 

An example of how open data helps us is the National Weather Service. Because they distribute this information, developers can make programs with 10-day forecasts based on your location and even simple apps like seeing if it will rain today. This information has helped launch a variety of business models from The Weather Channel to Weather Bug. 

This kind of information is vital for citizens to create a productive environment. And the more information we have access to, the better our community can run and develop. There are many different data sets we hope will become available such as Election Results, Crime Statistics, Property Data, Information for Hunting and Fishing and so much more.

This week was a great meeting! We had a huge turnout and the pizza flew out of the box. But we always think outside the box, right? This week was particularly exciting as this Saturday we are hosting the Miami Open Data Jam! This an event for everyone, coders and non-coders, to share their ideas on how we can make Open Data a standard in Miami-Dade County. Sign up and share your ideas with us!

We introduced some new Core Members of the Code for Miami Team. Danielle Ungermann is the new Community Organizer, keeping track of members and important dates as well as spreading the word of Code for Miami. Maggie Diaz-Vera will be our Storyteller, updating social networks and the Code for Miami blog with important/useful information and weekly updates. Xavier Hayeck and Antonio Llanos will act as the Delivery Leads. Xavier and Antonio will be the people to go to if you want to be assigned to or learn more about the projects going on at Code for Miami.

We had a special guest join us for last night's meeting. Waldo Jaquith from the U.S. Open Data Institute and creator of The State Decoded happened to be in Miami for a conference and decided to join us to see what we are doing to make Miami's data more transparent. We want to thank him very much for sharing his ideas on how we can use the Local Business Tax Data, the XML file we've created from the Municode information, and general ideas on getting Miami-Dade's data to be more open.

Some projects that are still in development are the Open 311 application, the Text My Bus App is currently in the testing stage, and we have been given a new project to develop in Rep Miami. Rep Miami is an application started by Patrick that will be developed for citizens to be able to easily get into contact with their local representatives.

A special thank to Wyncode as well as they filmed our meeting last night to be featured in a video highlighting the growth of technology in Miami and Wynwood and the launch of their new code school.