Louisville announces civic data partnership with IFTTT | Hacker News Reader

Louisville announces civic data partnership with IFTTT

louisvilleky.gov

25 pointsrmason17 comments

Not to complain about something not exactly related but I wish the city of Louisville could make traffic data more available. The Trimarc.org site is not that great on mobile, many of the cameras do not work, and a couple of wks back they disabled their RSS feed. So far none of the open data crap this city has done is worth a damn.

Open Data is actually one of the other projects that I'm on, and I'm sorry that you haven't had much success with it. We do have Waze data that we're currently working on making available, but there are some agreements in place that we have to honor before releasing it. That being said, there are a few methods you could utilize to get this data. HERE has a few different APIs around traffic, and if you sniff around some of the Waze project repos on GitHub, you can find the data sources for your area.

Hello fellow hackers - I am one of the developers of the IFTTT integration project please follow me over to our public repo of the Louisville IFTTT project https://github.com/LouisvilleMetro/smartcity-ifttt

Yet another reason why I love living in louisville. I remember the first open data hackathon what, 3, 4 years ago at LVL1?

We have a few more coming up in the next couple of months, you should come on out!

Very intriguing partnership.

My team and I actually built this. If anyone has any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them to the best of my ability.

What are some recipes you can imagine people creating(beyond "if air quality < X, alert me")?

Are there plans to expose more data?

Oh absolutely! This is a first step, sort of an experiment to see how citizens use this platform. We chose IFTTT because it wouldn't tie us to any specific ecosystem (Alexa, Google Assistant etc), but would allow us flexibility in terms of service delivery.

That being said, our next steps are to include things like content, public safety announcements and the like. What I'm personally really excited about though is using this with Open Data. Pushing things like restaurant data, crime, neighborhood development, or road closures.

Alot of these won't be very exciting in the get go, as we get an idea of usability and reliability. But think about checking for SNAP/WIC benefit eligibility through a multitude of interfaces, and then automatically connecting to a local grocery (or e-grocer like Amazon Fresh), then having it delivered to your door. That impacts real change, while respecting citizen data rights (at least from the government).

Government has a huge amount of incredibly valuable data, that just needs a contextual lens for citizens. We just needed a good method to start this sort of work.

Additionally, this is also a method for exploring Smart home to smart city integration. "If air quality is bad, turn on my filtration system" is an easy win. Roll that in with all sorts of other environmental or situational data that we have, and you can really flesh out a city that is responsive to the citizen.

Did you do this in partnership with Socrata? Just curious if these recipes could be used in other cities.

We did not do this with Socrates, we actually built this on our own, and are in the process of open sourcing the API for other people to take advantage of. We're planning on connecting it to our Open Data portal, which is based on DKAN, which will open up all sorts of new data sources.

Look forward to it. We've got cities here in Michigan running both Socrata and DKAN.

Hey what city in Michigan uses DKAN for their open data portal? We use it in Louisville.

+1 Socrata would great. This will open the data to wide range of existing clients that support the format.

Hey Matt!

Are you with IFTTT or the City of Louisville?

I'm actually with the Digital Services team, at Louisville Metro Government.

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