Events - Civic Tech 4 Pack in Chicago - Tue Aug 5 (before hack night) - Poplus, 3 MN Civic Tech Intros

It is great to see the RSVPs coming in for our last minute invite for
the pre-hack night events at 1871 tomorrow (Tuesday).
 
We still have space: http://civictech4pack.eventbrite.com
 
Come to one or both sessions.
 
BTW - If you haven't checked out Poplus yet, do so -
http://bit.ly/poplus . Below is the "demo" advice I received from
mySociety and Open North - so if you can't make it, this will be
helpful to get a sense of how this might be useful to Chicagoland and
beyond.
 
I'll be blunt and say that collaborative civic coding is a way far
more of middle America can benefit from civic tech with so many of the
funded resources in our field concentrated on the coasts. We need to
lower the cost and effort required and increase the benefits shared
from every civic tech investment. Without thoughtful sharing
approaches like these, rather than being a heart beat for civic tech
that helps feed and inspire middle America, Chicago will be that gated
city in Divergent. :-)
 
I am working on my slides here today from a base prepared by our
Chilean partners: http://bit.ly/popluspresentation
 
Steve
 
The demo advice:
 
#1
 
From: Dave Whiteland <<email obscured>>
Date: Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 5:26 AM
Subject: Re: [Poplus] Poplus Slides, Screencasts
 
 
Hi Steve
 
When showing Poplus to people (in RL, not online, btw) I've done this:
 
For a demo of SayIt components running as lovely standalones:
 
http://leveson.sayit.mysociety.org​/ <-- the Leveson enquiry is a UK
issue, of course, but we've singled out JK Rowling's testimony because
she's internationally known and the usefulness of publishing data like
this (about the bad behaviour of press) is that large sections of the
press, obviously, didn't report it. So not only is it making a
seemingly dull document readable and shareable, but in a semantic
context that is provocative about publishing public interest
reporting.
 
And then Shakespeare because it's showing that a transcript is
basically anything which records who said what, not just minutes of
meetings:
http://shakespeare.sayit.mysociety.org​/
 
Since those are obviously standalone sites, those demos segue nicely into
http://www.pa.org.za/hansard/
which is SayIt embedded in a bigger site, i.e. behaving as a
component. (Some of the examples in there are better than others
simply because the speakers tend to say a lot in each speech).
 
Similarly, a "naked" PopIt like this:
http://kenyan-politicians.popit.mysociety.org​/
(demonstrating Tom's idea that "a database of politicians should be as
easy to set up as a Tumblr blog") seques into FCI's used of PopIt
embedded in a site
http://votainteligente​.cl​/election​/segunda​-vuelta​-presidencial​/evelyn​-matthei​-2
(FCI rock! \o/ )
 
So that's SayIt and PopIt demonstrating they're useful/lovely
standalone but also play nicely as components.
 
Then a more technical example is our UK Mapit because its value as a
public standalone site is not really why it exists -- but it's been
fabulously, crucially useful as a component serving some of our
hardest-working sites for years already:
 
So: Buckingham Palace for the Queen, postcode SW1A1AA:
http://mapit.mysociety.org​/postcode​/SW1A1AA​.html
 
but the point is if the Queen's cavalcade hits a pothole on the way
out of the gates, and she wants to report it, FixMyStreet uses the API
call (note this is getting JSON now, not the webpage) to determine to
whom the report should go:
 
http://mapit.mysociety.org​/postcode​/SW1A1AA​.json
 
which turns out to be Westminster Council
 
http://mapit.mysociety.org​/area​/2504​.html
 
And that JSON call (and thousands of others like it every day) is of
course used on our FixMyStreet to give this
 
https://www.fixmystreet.com​/around​?pc​=sw1a1aa
 
without the users even knowing the component is involved.
 
NB I don't think the Queen has done this yet (if her staff have not
installed the app on her phone she can still use the responsive
website).
 
That's a good example because actually the standalone MapIt website is
really of very little public interest, and the real value of it is
precisely as a service acting as a component to other sites.
 
For example our UK parliamentary site uses exactly the same MapIt
component to determine which electoral constituency a user is in (see
post code input here):
 
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
 
and so on, for lots of other location-to-authority mappings.
 
Oh and of course we run http://global.mapit.mysociety.org which is a
component made
public to the world[1] loaded up with OpenStreetMap's admin boundary data:
 
for example, here's Zagreb, Croatia
http://global.mapit.mysociety.org​/area​/573355​.html
 
...the point here being that the same usefulness we've been exploiting
on the UK sites demonstrated above is easily extended to anywhere with
the data... and if the OSM data isn't good enough, you can spin up
your own MapIt component and put whatever data you want in it (which
is exactly what we do when setting up FixMyStreet in places with no
published boundary data).
 
Hope this walk-through helps -- it's worked for me in person in
presentations (where of course I take the trouble to find a locally
relevant example of the global.mapit demo).
 
Yours
Dave
 
[1] rate-limited
 
 
#2
 
 
From: James McKinney <<email obscured>>
Date: Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Poplus] Poplus Slides, Screencasts
To: Steven Clift <<email obscured>>
Cc: Dave Whiteland <<email obscured>>,
 
 
Hi Steven,
 
The best demo of Represent Boundaries is probably
http://represent.opennorth​.ca​/demo​/ Just type in any major Canadian
city (except Montreal, we haven’t imported the city’s elected
officials yet) and you should get the reps with their emails, and a
“Map” link for each to see their jurisdiction.
 
A more illustrative example would be a nonprofit website, where you
enter a postal code and it finds the appropriate recipient for an
email campaign. However, these campaigns don’t last long, and the
pages are not as well designed for a demo, but I can probably find you
one if you think it will help.
 
Thanks for demoing!
 
James
 
Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org
Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy
Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072