Open311 dashboard enchancement proposal

[jsankalp]

Hi,I am Sankalp Jain from Indraprastha University,Delhi and I have been going through the ideas mentioned on the page and and I am interested in improving upon open311.

1-Data visualization enhancements

While exploring open311dashboard I felt it needs enhancements so that it can present a clearer picture of outstanding requests,area wise,city wise which can also be presented in a graphical manner using google-chart (https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/) or django charts. We can also add functionality of getting a frequency wise distribution like the most frequent service request-overall,in an area,city,street and so on something like youtube stats.

This can also be further enhanced to generate pdf reports dynamically like say,NYPD ( http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/crime_prevention/crime_statistics.shtml) site has crime statistics.(http://www.reportlab.com/software/opensource/rl-toolkit/download/).

Then we can further enhance it to present data changes over a period that can be determined by the user.This I think will require some modifications in the API as sending the whole data is neither needed nor efficient and the data can be loaded asynchronously as needed.

2- Android app

I have observed that there is no android app while there is an iphone app for the same. Can this not be a part of ideas list?

Do the clients have to register for an account before sending requests to the server. Because if it is not so there might be spam users who are not using the system in the way it is supposed to. So we can flag such users. Genuine users can track the status of their requests in the app and get updated when it is closed.

I developed a similar app (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g-Debc8HIo) which shares some of the concepts. It has a basic dashboard and can use the GPS or QRCodes to make requests and it is updated at the admin end. What if multiple user make the same requests? Does the system mark it as more important than the rest.?

3- "Work on better tools for cities to manage their 311 requests both in the office and in the field."

What does 'in the field' means? Is it some kind of updating mechanism when the caretaker takes care of the request?

4- I also read the Civic API idea but it does not cite any resources and examples.Can you give me some idea how that is going to work,data sets etc.

Thanks Sankalp Jain

[jsankalp]

@dthompson I have been looking for your inputs on this proposal and some ideas to proceed further. Or should I just submit the proposal(which I will be finished with by tomorrow).

[mick]

Sorry I must have missed this while it was closed...

1) While it could be a good project to help cities make more sense of their open311 data, we'd rather support existing projects for this, so you have some ideas of enhancements to existing open311 dashboard and viz projects, that be good.

2) There is an android app, not made by Cfa, but made by the city of Bloomington https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/open311-android/ We'd certainly like to see more people contribute to that project but it is out of scope for our gsoc program.

3) It means outside of an office, so possibly tools for the workers who are working on resolving issues. (this idea is far too undeveloped, and mostly likely not going to be pursued this summer.)

4) The discussion here might be useful for you: https://github.com/codeforamerica/dev/issues/4

[jsankalp]

@dthompson Yeah I accidently closed the issue.My bad.

1- Now that points 2 and 3 are not feasible this summer, I am concentrating on the Civic API idea and have been going through the ChicagoCrime(http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/) website,API and frontend for a while. Frankly speaking I can not think of any features that I would like to add into it except for maybe a few modules for better analysis of the data by generating reports in natural language.For example comparing two neighbourhoods we can present a report that compares the data and the trends using English language words like 'on the otherhand','contrary to','compared to' etc. The frontend(https://github.com/newsapps/chicagocrime) is very minimal and very little work has been done on visualization of data,which can be improved.

2- Is there any pre-existing data that I can browse through for building info,food inspection and business license. Will this data be provided later on?

3- As you mentioned in the issue in previous comment (4)

We can also make a mobile app as well as a web browser based application to add new data to the dataset. While a mobile user can add data on the go and would mostly be intermittent and small,a browser based application can read from a big amount of data that the user uploads in a data format that he/she wants. This would then require using validators and sanitizers to make sure that the data is correct and correct to the schema.

4- As far as APIs are concerned we can add some functionality like:

a) When a user submits a request for,say crime, to the API he may actually need data for all the areas that it shares a border with. For example Northpark shares a border with Albany and Forest Glen.This will be useful as mostly crimes are not limited to a small area and have a correlation with the neighbourhood.

b) For the food APIs we can integrate it with services like (http://www.zomato.com/api) which can use our data on food safety to generate recommendations.This would be needed as people otherwise won't be interested in accessing a separate data source just to check for food safety while there is someone offering better services. Also we can make a separate app that may use google maps to locate eateries using this data.

Do these ideas make any sense to you.?

[jsankalp]

I have submitted the proposal at https://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/jsankalp/1 and look forward to incorporate changes as per as your suggestions.