News

Help the relief effort in Nepal with HOTOSM

Yesterday a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal, devastating the city of Katmandu. International relief efforts are underway, but one way individuals across the web are contributing is through HOTOSM - the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

Lyzi Diamond came to our Civic Study Hall earlier today to work on tasks for HOTOSM and show people how to help out.

So how does mapping help people on the ground in disaster areas? I'll let Lyzi explain:

It's valuable to map the basemap of disaster areas so that supplies and aid can be distributed effectively. Haiti was the first time OpenStreetMap was used to help with aid effort. Volunteers on the ground were providing information and people around the world were mapping. There were even some volunteers translating from Creole to English to help with the mapping effort. The toolset and the dataset are both so easy to use and well-done that you can use it in a disaster area.

Mapping work gets assigned and completed through tasks.hotosm.org. Here's how it works:

1. Go to tasks.hotosm.org and pick a task

hotosm tasks

More recent or important tasks will be at the top of the list.

Be sure to read the instructions for the task, as each task is not only a specific area but also a specific dataset (one task will be mapping roads, other buildings).

2. Select an area you want to edit

hotosm task areas

That area is locked for you for two hours. You can unlock it at any time. If you feel like you have finished it, you can mark it as done.

That's it! Helping to identify roads and buildings and improving the quality of maps in affected areas can make a big difference in helping relief workers and volunteers on the ground identify priorities and deliver aid.

If you're interested in finding out more about HOTOSM, a lot of information is available on their website. They also post regular updates on twitter.

Posted: 26 May 2015 by Nate Goldman

November Hack Night

Hello people of Portland! We've got some guests from various great projects joining us for our monthly hack night this Tuesday. RSVP on meetup for pizza!

OpenStreetMap, Building Footprints, and You

PDX-OSGEO and MaptimePDX have teamed up with the City of Portland to import building footprints into OpenStreetMap. They started working on this project at a hackathon last Saturday and we've invited them to continue working at our November hack night this coming Tuesday.

Read more about it: Let's Import Buildings to OSM!

OpenTrails update with Trailhead Labs

Ryan and Jereme from Trailhead Labs are in town and have graciously offered to give us an update on all the hard work they've been doing around the OpenTrails spec since we last saw them at our National Day of Civic Hacking event. Here's some info on what it's all about:

OpenTrails (the Open Trail System Specification) is an open data format designed to help governments at the local, state, and federal level publish digital trail maps for visitors. Versions 1.0 and 1.1 were developed in 2014 with formal input from a variety of stakeholders, well-documented governance, and a proven use case for digital maps and apps.

OpenTrails enables agencies to create high-quality interactive maps, combine data with other agencies in their region, and provide well documented open data to web and app developers.

Trailhead Labs, a core contributor to OpenTrails, will be giving a brief update on adoption across the country, some ongoing open source projects that do cool things with OpenTrails, and a brand new API that aggregates and surfaces OpenTrails data across the country.

More info at Open Trail Data.

CCC Presents: Avenues to Advocacy

We may also have someone come in to talk about the Avenues to Advocacy project and the hackathon we co-hosted with the Community Cycling Center a couple of Saturdays ago. Lillian Karabaic will discuss the tool and demo the progress at the Bicycle Lunch and Learn on November 20th, and maybe give us a preview of her talk this Tuesday!

Here's the recap of the hackathon if you want to find out more.

HackOregon unveils Behind the Curtain

Our friends at HackOregon had a launch party to unveil the work they've been doing on their Behind the Curtain project. They've gathered an amazing amount of campaign finance data from the State of Oregon and turned it into some great visualizations to help people understand the role money plays in campaign politics. There's plenty of info from the last election -- for example, here's the Vote Yes On Measure 92 fund vs. the NO On 92 Coalition fund. If we're lucky we might also get a visit from one of the HackOregonians who can tell us more about it.

Check out the Behind the Curtain beta!

Be There or Be Square

We hope to see you this Tuesday! After a few short presentations we'll get to our usual hacking and chatting and pizza-eating.

More event details are available on the meetup page.

Psst.. help us out!

You may have noticed we've been short on blog posts lately. That's because we need help! We've been spread pretty thin between all these great projects and we are but a rag-tag bunch of volunteer organizers. If you love writing about civic hacking and want to help out please let us know at [email protected].

Posted: 16 Nov 2014 by Nate Goldman

National Day of Civic Hacking Wrap-Up

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who joined us this weekend! As Erica has already said to the project leaders, "I can hardly believe how much we got done, how absolutely stellar the quality of work was, and how much sharing and collaboration and community building we all did!"

We'd also like to thank our sponsors, Esri, Fine Design Group, Epicodus, North, and Urban Airship, without which this event would not have been possible. Esri, Fine, and Urban Airship provided the food and beverages, while Epicodus and North provided awesome venues. There are lots of great pictures and moments to remember on our Twitter feed.

Keep reading for more info on the projects, and you can even find some of them on the main NDoCH site. And if you aren't already on the Code for Portland Google group, you can join and get all the details and updates on projects. And we'll keep hacking on them (and probably start some new ones) at our next Hack Night on June 17th.

Finally, we want to invite you to join us for a fun group hike (Hike for Portland) this Saturday (June 7th) to stretch our legs and test some of the open trail data apps we worked on last weekend. Take a look at the Code for Portland Meetup group for all the info!

Project reports

Portland City Council Agenda Bot Project

Project repo: github.com/donpdonp/council-report

This project idea was brought up by the city a few years ago - they wanted broader public input and engagement on the agenda, ideally before the week's meetings began.

Because it’s really important to us to be collaborative and not re-implement work already being done, we took time to do some research and discover what, if any, similar efforts have already been made. Although we found a similar project from three years ago, after contacting one of the maintainers, we were able to confirm that it was no longer active.

Now, we have a scraper that scrapes council agenda items from the City of Portland Council Agenda Page and from there it creates a JSON feed that is consumable by anything. For example, there is an IFTTT (If This, Then That) that takes the JSON feed and posts it to Twitter and to Facebook, and we also have a bot that posts agenda items to Reddit for community discussion.

Hack Oregon "Behind the Curtain" Campaign Finance Visualization Project

Project repo: github.com/hackoregon

Hack Oregon is a non-profit group focused on building local civic data projects in Portland and Oregon. They are currently working on beta launch for their "Behind the Curtain" project to visualize campaign finance information for the 2014 election year.

For the National Day of Civic Hacking, their Spatial Data Team have been working on standardizing a database to define district lines down to the local county level. This will allow for better searchability for people wanting to know who all their representatives are and which seats are up for re-election.

Follow their project and keep updated on the launch at hackoregon.org.

PDX Trails Project

Project Repo: github.com/mbcharbonneau/PDX-Trails

Metro has a whole lot of really great data about bike and pedestrian counts in Portland and lots of info about how people use the trails. All of it is in spreadsheets right now and they want to find a way to visualize the data and make better use of it.

The team brainstormed ways to use this data and came up with some great ideas that can really help people and show useful information. For example: we can show trails that are ADA accessible and where they are, trails that have parking nearby, protected crossings, safe bike commuter routes, or are particularly scenic.

The project is a map application that asks questions to determine what trail you are looking for. You start with broader categories like biking or walking and narrow your focus from there based on what matters most to you.

Right now, we are working on importing PLATS compatible geometric trail data and assigning it the values from the spreadsheets and displaying it on the map in a heat-map style. So the trails that best fit your criteria will really stand out on the map for you. Eventually, you will also be able to tap on a trail and pull up more information about the trail.

Trail Editor Project

Project repo: github.com/trailheadlabs/trailheadit

The Trail Editor team (Dale, Alan, Razaik, Ryan and Jereme) worked with Oregon Metro to develop a better way to collect trailhead and point of access locations for the region’s trail network. Metro is about to undertake an effort to inventory all of these points, and the Trail Editor team set out to help them. Trailhead data is an important data set for geospatial analysis of trail networks, and supports building applications designed to get people outside.

Trail Editor enables users to document trailheads in the field by taking a photo of a spot, and e-mailing it to a special agency e-mail address. Once sent, the Trail Editor app reads the photo file for latitude, longitude and elevation, then replies back to the e-mail with a link to view the documented trailhead. The user--whether it be a volunteer, staff person or visitor--can then describe the amenities available at that spot in more detail---such as whether bike parking, or bathrooms, or drinking water are available on site. Ultimately, park agencies will be able to download all this data in the OpenTrails format, creating a trailhead dataset they can use with their existing trail right-of-way data.

Wasteshed Visualization Project with Community Environmental Services

Project repos:

CES is a non-profit, housed within Portland State, that does research and program work on waste and recycling topics. They currently have some 25 years of quantitative data, all in spreadsheets and 17 current projects that are generating more data all the time.

They would like to figure out how to visualize and analyze waste stream data at a "wasteshed" level to find ways to influence member behavior, change the secondary market (purchase of materials to be recycled), and increase waste diversion.

We have an on-going partnership with CES to help them share their work with the community by creating a way to easily parse their existing data and have a platform for distributing and analyzing the aggregated data.

We started this project with the data they have collected from the Lloyd Eco-District, which is a group of businesses within the Lloyd Center area. The Lloyd Eco-District board is partnered with CES and are collaborating with them to analyze material sourcing and the waste stream at a level that transcends individual businesses.

At the Hackathon, we looked at a bunch of documents and pieced together what data is available to build off of, and as of Saturday morning, we have a awesome data structure to work with.This data structure will help CES organize their data better and make it easier for other groups to use their data for future projects as well.

The next step is to build a front end for data visualization and put it on a map using Lloyd Ecodistrict GIS data we got from our Metro representative. Our group also had a great time working together, everyone came with a different language background and we got to learn together and work together and figure out how to do ruby and frontend all together. There was a lot of great teamwork with everyone teaching each other.

Never stop hacking

See you all next time! We'll keep having hack nights monthly, so if you can't make it on the 17th, don't worry, you can catch up in July.

Upcoming Events

Posted: 03 Jun 2014 by Mele Sax-Barnett and Erica Lauer Vose

Hacking on Open Trail Data at NDoCH

We're kicking off the second National Day of Civic Hacking this Friday at Epicodus (RSVP here), and we're very excited to share all the projects coming together for this weekend's hackathon! We've gotten support and ideas from Community Environmental Services, Oregon Metro, the Portland Development Commission, and many other great groups. Our biggest contributors have been all the great folks from the local tech community who've been coming to our meetings (thank you!).

Open Trail Data

We've got some special guests joining us from San Francisco for this hackathon. Alan Williams and Peter Welte from Code for America along with Ryan Branciforte from Trailhead Labs will be joining us to work on open trail data projects. Alan has been working on the Public Land and Trail Specification (PLATS): an open, lightweight data specification for public land and trails. PLATS allows trail data to be easily shared between different local governments and agencies, and consumed on the web and mobile devices. There's already been input and activity on the specification from people and agencies all over the country. You can read more about the specification and see it for yourself here.

Trailhead Labs and Code for Portland volunteers have been working with Metro to get trail data ready to work with. There's already been some work done on conversion tools, and one of our planned projects will involve building trail data visualization tools using the PLATS format. There's a growing list of ideas for projects on GitHub too!

Join Us!

We're very excited that folks from Code for America and Trailhead Labs are coming up to Portland to work with our city first. Please join us this weekend to work with these folks as well as many others!

NDoCH Kickoff Party Details
NDoCH Northwest Hackathon Details
  • Time:
    • Saturday, May 31st, 10 AM to 5 PM
    • Sunday, June 1st, 10 AM to 3 PM
  • Location: North
  • Please RSVP!
Posted: 29 May 2014 by Nate Goldman

Hack Night 2: Civic Boogaloo

This Tuesday marks our second Hack Night as a Code for America brigade, and we're hitting the ground running! The second National Day of Civic Hacking is happening at the end of the month, and Portland has no less than two events in the works to celebrate the occasion.


Hacking Urban Development with Intel

The first event is being put together by Intel and Zidell Yards as part of Intel's Code for Good program, and will be focusing on community-driven urban planning and development of the growing South Waterfront district. They are running a two day hackathon and offering awards to the best project in each of the event's categories.

RSVP for Intel's Hackathon here!


Building Lasting Services with Code for Portland

The second event is being put together by our group with sponsorship from Esri, Fine Design Group, Epicodus, and North, and is focusing on using technology and open data to build useful and sustainable services for the citizens of Portland and beyond. We're planning on having a full day of hacking on Saturday and presentations on Sunday at North on 1515 NW 19th Ave, and an after party over at Zidell Yards on Sunday afternoon to connect with the folks from the other event and trade stories.

RSVP for Code for Portland's Hackathon here!

In the spirit of collaboration, the two hackathons are having a kickoff party together on Friday, May 30th at Epicodus. There will be beer and food! Minors are also welcome.

RSVP for the joint Kickoff Party here!

We're inviting people to come to tomorrow's Hack Night to hear some guest speakers talk about projects. We'll be talking about projects from local non-profits dealing with civic engagement, voter education, campaign finance data, and environmental impact in need of help, and we'll have some guests from Code for America and Portland Metro talking about an open trail data project.

We're also encouraging people to propose their own ideas and bring in worthy projects they think might benefit from the exposure. After that we'll be breaking into groups based on interest and planning what to work on during the hackathon at the end of the month.

Thinking Beyond Hackathons

We think Portland is the perfect city to lead the effort to build distributed, community-maintained open source systems on top of open data and be a leader in the world of civic hacking. As a city, we've already done a lot of trailblazing in this area, but there's plenty more work to do and people to help.

We're hoping you're as excited as we are to build good things that last and to see what we can do to make our city even more awesome than it already is.

Come to tomorrow's hack night! Help us plan, pitch an idea, join a project!

Event Details


Related
Posted: 19 May 2014 by Nate Goldman

Hack for Change in Portland: National Day of Civic Hacking

The National Day of Civic Hacking is a nationwide event to build innovative civic projects planned in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and will be supported by a number of federal, state and local agencies.

Kick-off Party

Portland is hosting two Civic Hackathons in celebration of this national day. Join us for a joint kick-off event to celebrate, get inspired, and hear more about each hackathon. There’s all kinds of dreaming, creating, and hacking you can be part of!

Date:
Friday, May 30th
Location:
Epicodus
Time:
6pm - 9pm
Please RSVP


Northwest Hackathon

Portland’s Northwest Hackathon will focus on direct collaboration with nonprofits, public agencies, and organizations in Portland. Sit down with the people serving our community and help them solve the tough problems and address the needs they face everyday. See your work have real-world impact right before your eyes and help build a lasting community that is passionate about finding technological solutions to shared problems in our city.

The Northwest Hackathon is hosted by Code for Portland, a brigade of Code for America and sponsored by North, Epicodus, Fine Design, and ESRI.

Northwest Hackathon Details

Date:
Saturday, May 31st and Sunday, June 1st
Location:
North, 1515 NW 19th Ave.
Time:
Saturday, 10am - 10pm
Demo+Party
12pm - 3pm
Please RSVP

We have tentatively planned to all come together at Zidell Yards on Sunday for lunch and a joint demo of what each group worked on with a party on the waterfront to follow.


Southwest Hackathon

Portland’s Southwest Hackathon will focus on better planning of urban areas. Join us in imagining what our Portland of the future will look like with new models of innovation, community, and economic development. Bring your ideas and be part of the creative innovation that makes Portland unique.

The Southwest Hackathon is sponsored by Intel and hosted at Zidell Yards in Southwest Portland.

Southwest Hackathon Details

Date:
Saturday, May 31st and Sunday, June 1st
Location:
Zidell Yards, 3121 SW Moody Ave.
More info about this hackathon
Posted: 17 May 2014 by Erica Lauer Vose

We're Official!

As of this week, we are an Official Brigade of Code for America!

We met with Preston Rhea, Brigade Program Coordinator for Code for America who reviewed our strategic plan and talked with us about next steps towards becoming an official brigade of Code for America.

Shortly after this meeting, we got word that our strategic plan has been approved and we have been made an official Brigade! You can see our listing on the Code for America site.

Want to get involved? Join the google group

Posted: 15 May 2014 by Erica Lauer Vose

Partnership Building with the Portland Development Commission

We met with Jared Wiener, Software Industry Liaison at PDC, after he reached out to us to talk about a new project the PDC is working on to help people connect with public agencies in Portland.

While both groups are brand new and in formation, we are still talking and working on finding ways to help each other. There are all kinds of possibilities in the air!

The Portland Development Commission has been a driving force in Portland’s reputation for vibrancy and livability. As Portland’s urban renewal and economic development agency, PDC focuses on investing in the job creation, innovation and economic opportunity that will transform Portland into one of the world’s most desirable and equitable cities.

Want to help with partnership building? It’s easy to get involved: join the google group

Posted: 06 May 2014 by Erica Lauer Vose

Partnership Building with Community Environmental Services

Nate Goldman, Nate Whitstock, and I met with Eric Crum Executive Director of CES and Research & Development Director, Nate Forst to chat about how we could partner on projects.

What a great meeting - we couldn’t have asked for a better match! They have some data sets around Eco Districts and high-impact project needs that we can start working on right now. They are data nerds at heart that really gets open data and wants to be part of this awesome movement.

CES is a nonprofit research and service unit at Portland State University that provides all kinds of data, data collection, research, technical assistance, and educational outreach services to help reduce solid waste.

We are so excited to have connected with CES and can’t wait to see what awesome projects we get to work on with them!

Want to help with partnership building? It’s easy to get involved: join the google group

Posted: 28 Mar 2014 by Erica Lauer Vose

Partnership Building with City Club of Portland

City Club of Portland is all about bringing together civic-minded people to make Portland a better place to live, work and play, for everyone. We met with Matt Keenen, the chair for City Club of Portland’s Member-Led forum/committee on Transportation, Technology & Access.

Nate Whitstock and I chatted about ways we might be able to partner and have been working with Matt and with City Club ever since. Although we haven’t found a tech project to collaborate on, we have lots in common and they are a great partner to have in building civic engagement.

Want to help with partnership building? It’s easy to get involved: join the google group

Posted: 05 Mar 2014 by Erica Lauer Vose

Partnership Building with Oregon Volunteers

When considering where to begin with partnership building, I like to seek out the people I admire most. I sat down with a friend and mentor, Kathleen Joy, Executive Director of Oregon Volunteers.

Oregon Volunteers is the Oregon Commission for Voluntary Action & Service. Their mission is to strengthen our communities by inspiring Oregonians to actively engage, volunteer, and serve.

It goes without saying that Kathleen was very interested in Code for Portland, given that her life work centers around civic engagement. She had a million great ideas and tips for who to talk to on our way towards building partnerships and finding projects to benefit our community!

Want to help with partnership building? It’s easy to get involved: join the google group

Posted: 25 Feb 2014 by Erica Lauer Vose