mick
commented
11 years ago Awesome to see you apply again @JCody!
It would be great to have you back at cfa again! I'd also be interested in working on some more analysis issues, and looks like your new experience in R would be great for that.
Mick
Hey Mick @dthompson and the rest of @codeforamerica!
Long time no see, I hope all is well! I'm just finishing up my last Statistics/CS classes down at UC Santa Barbara and am constantly reminiscing about the best summer of my life at CfA.
I really liked the GSoC 13 idea of Open311 visualizations, and more specifically visualization tools for developers. I sifted through the Chicago and San Francisco open data sites and there are plenty of data sets readily available, but it's hard to make anyone sense of 10k rows of public information.
Instead, there should be some sort of client side developer toolset (i.e. a js library) or a REST API for generating various common functions and graphs. This would enable developers to better create visualizations and spread more open data based apps for the general public. I have focused this past academic year on data mining and statistical computing; most of my schoolwork has involved Ruby and R.
I have created a demo using data from data.sfgov.org that might serve as a possibility of some of the visualizations possible. I used the crime statistics over the last 30 days from here: https://data.sfgov.org/Public-Safety/SFPD-Incidents-Previous-Three-Months/tmnf-yvry
The R code and corresponding js output is here: http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://gist.github.com/JCody/5499442/raw/e584d4fbc3811643c4250f818ee64548152e2f9f/sfcrimeoutput.html https://gist.github.com/JCody/5499442
(Interesting to note that something looks significantly incorrect about Monday. With 26k rows of crimes, either SF doesn't report Monday crimes or data.sf is failing to include Mondays).
Ideally these could be wrapped into either an easy to use library or integrated and well documented in the Open311 API spec for other developers' reference. Some of my favorite CfA apps have been mapping visualizations of opencity data, but it hasn't always been as easy as it could be to create these.
I'd love to get the chance to come back to the CfA headquarters this summer now that I'm (almost) done with school and commit to helping the fellows change the face of cities in the US. My ping pong isn't nearly as good as it was, but I feel like I'm a much better developer and I'm only looking immerse myself in code and continue to learn.
Thanks for all your help last summer Mick! I miss all the fellows, but I'm glad to see things are still running strong at CfA.
If you have any questions or if there's any specific way I can better guide this project, let me know.
Thanks!