Civic and Humanitarian Open Source

hello everyone my name is Tim Duffy

hello everyone my name is Tim Duffy this is civic and humanitarian open source a little bit about myself so I kind of by day I'm a pga designer firmware software person work on embedded computing devices that are usually very low power or lower power compared to normal computers today and then also if you ever need a website written or anything like that I do a quite a bit of a web developer contract work as well and then in all the time that's left over after that I I like to consider myself a civic hacker although after having two children I am doing it significantly less than I would like but as these things right so what's a hacker in case

anyone at this particular conference isn't familiar with that but seriously right so right a hacker is someone that likes tinkering that likes questioning that likes poking and understanding you know what's right underneath the service and even deeper and this is right from Wikipedia so you can enjoy it yourself later on but so what is open source and we talk about that a lot in the world of software because we're standing on each other's shoulders moving forward here and a lot of the technologies that we take advantage over you every day either are open source themselves or they're leveraging a massive open source ecosystem all of it almost all of Android is open source almost all of

Chrome is open source Firefox the computers that control the traffic lights run the open source software right Linux it's it is everywhere it's very ubiquitous and because it's software right if it's not flashy it's very difficult to identify so open source what is the culture of openness so free and open source software Foss has always had a culture of openness not only with sharing code but also sharing ideas and being or trying to be inclusive there are of course open source projects most notably sometimes makes it way into the news the Linux kernel project that are not as open as they could be but the culture of Foss I believe and I I find that most people that I speak to

that are very tuned into Foss believes that it fosters a culture of openness so civic hacking and open source go together very nicely and so what is civic hacking talked about what is it hacker what is open-source and I will bring it together so civic innovation I think we understand what innovation is changing things making new taking taking existing and bring it to the next level so Civic innovation and we can read write other the new idea our methodology the lives of citizens the functions of cities the practice of citizenship or state of community affairs so this is kind of civic innovation time it's a Alex Howard I highly recommend following him on Twitter there and so what is

civic innovation as implemented by hackers or civic hacking and I really I really like so Josh data he on Twitter he he he's had many different roles and he was in he still is in Washington and it was very much so a part of DC open source and civic and culture I I've met him briefly a few times and excellent gentlemen to speak with that conferences often civic hacking involves the use of government data to make government's more accountable but the goals of civic hacking are as diverse as those that call themselves hackers and really this drives home a point that is not immediately obvious when speaking with people that are not technical is that you can be a civic hacker and never

write a line of code there are data low data journalists that are big Civic hackers right they're consuming information digesting information and making it more accessible to people and so this is the new civic hacking can be programmers designers data scientists even just good communicators storytellers this specifically journalists they're entrepreneurs to fund the projects that move us forward civically government employees and anyone that is willing to get their hands dirty solving things so these are the kind of the five points that I think about when I think about civic hacking and humanitarian hacking is data liberation this is this is right when the state of New York said we're going to have data and why gov we're gonna

make a repository where any entity within the government can now post any amount of data they want to in this nice easily searchable and scrollable format right so all of a sudden these organizations come out of nowhere and they're like oh this is like the number of pencils that we've bought every year or this is disinformation in many cases they're PDFs and they're scanned and they're dirty and they're like at 90 degrees you know 40 degrees off so like what are you gonna do with that right and so that would be data liberation that could be as simple as someone just going I have a desire to get this particular piece of information and I'm

going to go and find it and then publish it or post it on Twitter or whatever it may be or as far as writing software to actually automatically pull that information out and making it more accessible indexable whatever it may be data collating taking information from lots of different places and putting it together into one one location so you don't you're saying that yes all the information is out there that you need however it's going to take you twenty four hours of actually looking on the internet to get that that's no one has time for that so if one or a small group of people can spend the time to collate all of that information together now you're reducing

the barrier to entry for others to consume that information and that information can be very very powerful for changing everything from election results to how towns actually go about spending tax dollars data portals and dashboards this is a lot of times you'll see like definitely during election season just because it gets so much press that the New York Times and other well-funded data organs are generalists organizations will have these data portals and dashboards we can kind of interactive and fill around with things this generates a lot of user interaction and allows people to think a little bit more about what the data actually means and what what of the data that is being presented is important to them

especially if there's a user interaction involved infographics these are really [Music] infographics these are really great for social media right so you can just share them really quick we see them all the time oh you know cat picture you know kid internal outfit whatever and infographic about something really important about my town you hopefully don't just keep scrolling down but that allows for you know dissemination everywhere very very quickly and you know you have again a small number of people spending us realistically a small amount of time to create these assets and to create these tools which will then increase the exposure of that information across you know what could be a very very wide

range of people and then of course storytelling so this is your traditional journalists role you know journalists it's in a town meeting takes a bunch of notes goes back writes a story about it and now instead of the thirty two people that were at the town meeting the thirty two hundred people in the town now understand because they read it at the local newspaper and then so the next meeting where they're actually going to vote on it three hundred and twenty people showed up instead of thirty two and then it did or did not pass because more people are informed it's kind of like the idea behind the civic engagement in civic hacking so painted a picture of what it is to be

a civic hacker or what I have found to be the definition of being a civic hacker so who is doing the hacking who are these these Civic hackers and and humanitarian evangelist sunlight foundation is a huge organization excuse me was a huge organization that was very involved with civic agging they have a significantly scroll cut back on the number of people they employ the projects they take on and unfortunately the funding for them has I don't want to say dried up but reduce significantly they were actually about to shut down right before the election results in 2016 and then they decided that that was not the best thing for America so they started back up again but I'm again a

much scaled-down scale reducing so Code for America so it's actually code for my but it's actually code for X was like code fulfill a code for Pittsburgh code for DC and Code for America is a pretty structured organization that they have a methodology the way they go about things and solving problems and that is the kind of different than like your traditional hackathon or a motivated individual that will just show up to an event and say I would like to work on X they've identified fields and projects that they would like to work on and move forward with those with talent resources there's not a code from Rochester at least not at the time of writing this

presentation which was three or four days ago so 18f 18f has kind of got an interesting story it started under the obama administration not long after the ACA rollout and the debacle behind healthcare.gov the idea was let's get a bunch of smart people in the room and understand you know maybe we could have done this a little bit differently and spend a lot less money i that was like 20 to 50 people that we're all kind of sitting around they very quickly identified what we'd like to do is take people out of industry and bring them into the government for short scope to amount of time 18 24 months and then put them back and then you're not allowed to

come back again so the idea is that we don't want to change the trajectory of your career we just would like to borrow some of your knowledge 18f now employs over 2,000 people and they take some very very difficult tasks one of the things that they did recently in last year was they made every single government website on the federal level HTTPS instead of HTTP which I can't even begin to understand the scope of that that's insane but so they do fall underneath the gsa which is underneath the White House so they do take their direction from the executive branch and the White House so some of the programs that they were working on they are not working on under

the current administration and now they're working on other things and vice versa what's yeah we're we're going on everything all sites are gonna be FTP now it's great yeah yeah offline browsing so hax hackers which is another um fairly new organization older than 18 F they started in I think yeah yeah so they started in 2009 West Coast some journalists and scientists computer scientists got together I said you know write computer scientists are really good at like ingesting and understanding these sets of problems and journalists are really good at understanding and telling stories about these sets of problems what can we do to bring these two people together to kind of bridge this gap technology is not stopping and

the complexity of technology is not being reduced at any point in the foreseeable future and we need the storytellers of the world to be able to better use this technology and better understand the store technology to accurately and quickly tell stories so there is slash was a Rochester chapter of hacks hackers um we were we were we were super active for about three years I'll say and then and people had kids yeah so it will it will come back so so they're they're hacks hackers is it's neat there are many chapters all over the world and some of them are entirely journalist other ones are entirely hackers so hacks being storytellers hackers being technologists we in

Rochester kind of very quickly became a very civic hacking oriented group we're primarily sponsored by wxxi and we ran a few pretty cool projects with them it's tough with this whole like well right so here are some of the projects one of them is national the other ones are local so motor city city mapping so Detroit goes bankrupt white house government or Washington says you have it was something like very short like 30 days to present us with a plan on how you're going to get out of bankruptcy with our money so the local leadership in Detroit comes up with a plan and the concept of blight is not included at all in in the report there is no plan at all

how money is going to be spent for reducing or affecting the blight in the city so very cool hackers got together and they made this thing called Motor City mapping yeah Motor City mapping that is the make Loveland calm is the name of the company that sponsored this its Motor City mapping is the actual URL they actually made an app on an iPad got people to volunteer with their iPads and mapped every single blighted property in the entire city in like seven days or something crazy like that by hand and it was by yes ma'am delighted so blight is a thank you so it's a house it's like abandoned right so blegh right so it's um and and it's

not necessarily just a house could be a property or another building but primarily it was residential buildings single or multi-family homes that had not been occupied so in many cases you want to knock those down for various different reasons the goal was to understand how many and where they were and how much money would be needed by the federal government to be give that so at least could be included in the budget whether or not the money was a right that's a government thing but dick you want to make sure you have all the information to the lawmakers so that they can appropriately apply funds so this was one of those we have an idea we

have a very limited amount of time and money let's execute it and it used people that were Technic technically savvy and not so rock the hood is a kind of a cool example of the city of Rochester put together a tool and released it and they use the technology that was proprietary and the services they used was becoming not free and they didn't want to pay for it anymore so hex hackers worked with them to get the raw data out of it and a few students at RIT during random hacks of kindness recreated it and is you know I don't know if it's actually hosted anymore I know that this the neighborhood data map they said they

were gonna come back with it and they never did so this is the only the only copy or version of it it has information by census grid on everything from socio-economic to number of people to race to age everything you can imagine about the city very very powerful and very important information for for decision-making in the private and public sector Rock report was a free and open source tool that allowed anyone to download it and report things whose done by RIT students as well and the idea here is that we may as we're driving through town be like why are these Powell's still not fixed and like your town supervisor literally may not know that because he doesn't drive that way

to school or to work right like that if they don't have the information they can't fix it or they can't adjust it trow farías was one of the larger projects that we took on at hack up state that i think that was one of a good example of we had no idea what we didn't know but there was this report that came out called not in my school yard and it looked at the proximity of schools to high traffic roadways and whether or not children were playing outside right next to you know places with lots of hydrocarbons coming out and so the original not my school yard was actually don't remember where it was out

of I want to say maybe Chicago anyway they took a long time to compile data by hand we were able to get a bunch of Department of Transportation information from New York State and we made a real-time map on that real-time I but a browsable map where the red was high traffic the purple was Leicester high but still high traffic and then all the dots are where all the schools are and we were this is all just publicly available information and the yellow ones were the ones that were within the per that paper that came out within like the concern to zone of the schools were very close to high-traffic roadways you can click on and get all this

information Yeller was some a very large ambitious project that I would say in my eyes was successful however ran out of funding and then the champ person championing it at wxx I left to go to another paper but Yeller was a hyperlocal community engagement app that was anonymous and geocentric so you could on a map see a dots of all the users draw a square or a circle around a particular area and send a question to all of the users that were in that area so it could be very very hyper focused so you have a one block area and say what do you think of the kwik-e-mart you know open drug market that is very clearly happening what

would you like to be done about that and all the people in that area would get that question and no one else you then would be able to read all the answers to questions and what other people were posting it was not only a question based you get free post additionally we spend a lot of time and focus on making it all anonymous we didn't keep logs or anything like that which there's all kinds of other technical challenges with that but this was all open source and can be used by anyone I will say that there's not a whole lot of good code at parts prep but that had an iOS app and an Android app

and server infrastructure so that was a that was definitely very very cool and very neat we actually use WXXI servers for that instead of AWS but yeah again that uh that kind of died in 2015 I guess Monro minutes is a good example of taking something to 90 percent five times in a row okay I wrote how am i doing on time thank you so vonroenn minutes the idea was to scrape the town and municipality websites for all of Monroe County in real time as quickly as possible to allow notifications of any time a new document was posted as well as taking PDFs and other documents that are difficult to consume either by computers or humans and indexing them so they

could be searched an example was Henrietta I had this big big to-do about making it so you could have chickens in your yard they were talking about it a lot so you could type in chickens and then all the town meeting then I'd say we came up that involved the word chickens you could you could then like view them so there was two kind of neat tools that came out of this project one was AI DDT I DDT which the internet document discovery tool is essentially really good denial-of-service attack tool if used incorrectly but really it will go and search any website for any kind of document so if you want all the JPEGs or if you want all the PDFs or if

you want all the doc Microsoft Word documents whatever you want it actually downloads a very small part of the beginning of the file uses the mean or mime type to identify it and then will keep track of all the pages that has gone so it will only visit any page on a website once so it's a that's many iterations of that it was previously the project goes bar barking owl and the other one is the APOD which stands for yet yet another PDF OCR tool which will take a PDF whether it is text or a scan or if it's sideways or if it's got dirt on it clean it all up and turn it into

text for you so that you can then take it in ingest that into something like elasticsearch both of those are gplv3 and open for anyone mano minutes did win the second place in the 18 t civic apps challenge in 2014 it is not currently up and running right now MC safety feed which some of you may have visited is is running right now you can go to it there are parts of the site that are not currently working but this is a real-time feed of all nonviolent 911 calls in Monroe County so if you go to this website you can get the 911 calls that are coming in it's about between 10 and 20 percent of

actual phone calls and so you can see that it has the time the the event that was being called in the address at which it is and then the responding agency so you can say that you know if there was a structure fire or something like that motor vehicle accidents it's neat to watch the numbers go up during likes ice storms and snowstorms and stuff like that so I don't want to say for for my my career I would say and my passion for free and open source software in civic hacking was very very largely influenced by the Fox faucet magic for previously class at RIT and my time at hax hackers I think that I without spending all this

time on the side doing these fun projects and kind of like being in a safe area and safe zone of failure to fail you know as much as I wanted to if you will I made me a better developer in my career I I was like ending these with like if you want to be a civic hacker too you can here are some some ideas of project ideas New York State invade our data is like really interesting and Chris and I fiddled with that many a year ago but every year there's more data which is neat it's violent and disruptive incident report and so you get to see things like the number of bullying reports per year will change

depending on who the superintendent is so that's not really realistic it's unlikely to the superintendent is influencing that at all it's just influencing how they're being reported so this is something that would be worth noting on monarch county election information information all over the place the mapping opiate addiction resources that's a great example of like just collecting information you don't have to be a civic hacker you can simply just make a list this is a list of all the resources for this you can just do that on casually enter time and glass that on Facebook like you're now a civic hacker and then pothole reporting uh I I want to say that link is actually dead on the

city of Rochester it's supposed to be like a you can click here and be like oh this is where the powell is but it's a terrible interfacing so this is me get ahold of me if you want to do some civic hacking stuff or just want to talk about typical any questions comments concerns like the Empire Strikes Back and that there's so much that's been lost can you just sum up again what's actually active right now and we can engage in sure that's not dead sure yeah yeah yeah right right right so in the case of motor sitting mapping right so that was like us like a one-time goal right they did it and and

was done all of the rest of these that are on this list other than MC safety feed yeah essentially are frozen in time so these are our projects that are no longer being developed MC safety feeders running at least but not uh not currently being developed either that was written like five years ago or so in PHP yeah go for it yeah so they're there I want to say they're actually still is a active hacks hackers group in Syracuse out of the iSchool Dan his name is and he's on Twitter he's a professor there Dan yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's Dan P a CH e Co and the eigen yeah grab me afterwards and he would be a good person

the not quite the equivalent of me he's a more of a journalist than a technologist but he's got a good read on all that

so it was hot myself yes yes right hand if you like about here um yeah so Chris Horne myself and Matt Burnie us were the three three kind of yep and then yeah then Matt Burnie us and Matt no at WXXI Tennessee in and then you know he's at the DNC yep I would like to yeah I really would I don't know about soon shortly maybe yeah but the great perhaps yeah I think we you know we benefited greatly from the Fox at RIT and you know engaged and excited students and that was driven by a handful of individuals at RIT that aren't either in the same roles or not here anymore so you know got to find

find the right people to to re-energize the group I think I'm at a time come find me if you want to chat [Applause] and look