Each year NCDPI makes 1.5 million rows of student achievement data available as open data. This goes down to each grade and subject all of NC’s 2,600 public and charter schools. The school monitor enables the public to visualize and compare this data. This encourages parent involvement and choice in their children’s current and potential schools.

OBJECTIVE: To bring the Adopt a Drain web app deployed in San Francisco to Durham.

The problem: many stormwater drains in Durham are covered in leaves.

How you can help:

Project Links: https://hackpad.com/Adopt-a-drain-hydrant-…-Code-for-Durham-JR1fp2UnN6M

Background

June 4 - Great way to jump in to the civic tech volunteer movement! Join the 40,000 other techies that want to power their communities with better technology, open data and open source projects!

The Museum of Durham History is installing an exhibit on Durham’s historic hospitals (Watts, Lincoln, and Duke) in the Health and Human Services building (414 E Main). The exhibit contains text and images, and the MoDH is interested in prototyping an interactive element that will allow people who were born in these hospitals to show their Durham pride.

The exhibit started out at the History Hub, where staff and volunteers noticed that a lot of visitors proudly declared that they were born in these hospitals. As it makes its way into the community, the MoDH wants to nurture that pride as a way to honor native Durhamites and a way to spark interest in the history of these hospitals.

The idea is to have a digital slideshow in the exhibit featuring photos of people who were born at Lincoln, Watts, County General, Durham Regional, and Duke hospitals. People could tweet a selfie of themselves in front of the exhibit (OR better yet, a baby photo!) and proudly declare that they are #DurhamBorn. The photo will then appear in a slide show on a tablet mounted to the wall in the exhibit. There will be some accompanying text to explain the project and encourage participation.

• Museum of Durham History

Prototyped Using the following services

• FlickrIt Slideshow Service
• If This Then That recipes for Twitter and Instagram to Flickr Integrations
• Flickr Account
• Github.io pages

Customization could be done using this Galleria JavaScript Library More Open Source code to draw on: http://slidedog.com/blog/free-open-source-twitter-wall-alternatives/

Paid version of Service ($199/mth) - https://www.sharypic.com

Our vision is to support the Durham community by aggregating and organizing housing related information in a way that moves community consensus and investment decisions forward. We want to ensure that we do not wait until it's too late for Durham to make the needed investments to ensure we remain a community with enough housing near employment for all socio-economic brackets. To start, we have created a generic framework for exploring data - thinking about how to model after the DataSF Housing Hub and adapting it to the Durham Area.

How you can help…

We are looking for UX / UI Designers / Front End developers to help us with the site! As you can probably see we've taken a template and are just running with the data/backend side.

• Non-Tech help
• Front end
• UX/Designers
• Back end
• Data Wranglers

Project Links

• Website prototype
• Github Repo: /affordablehousing
• Google Drive: link
• Email Listerve: cfnc housing
• Catalog of Potential Visualizations: Google Sheet - Feel free to add an idea!
• Census Data: City SDK: Java API

For quick overview (if new to project), check out this Dec 10 affordable housing report provided by consultant Karen Lado to the City of Durham

This is an emerging project born out of this initial Project Scope Brainstorm.

Issue Brief:

Sustainable economic development is difficult to get right. Durham is growing fast and may be missing the window to get the right policies and organizations in place to ensure it stays a place where people of all socio-economic backgrounds can work and live. Durham already lacks 14,500 affordable rental units according to DurhamCares. We don't want to live in a place with the same dramatic tension that San Francisco has experienced between the innovation/tech economy and those not in that sector. We want to be the model of sustainable urban growth in the digital age. We need tools to help guide the discussion.

Lack of public awareness around changes in affordable housing options in Durham and ability to track local inventories of rent within affordable ranges block by block as Durham grows is one major problem

Other Housing Problems:

• How many rental units are available for people earning at 40-60% Area Median Income (AMI)?
• Startups & low-wealth communities are at-risk of œgentrification
• Ensure housing inventory is aligned with workforce development efforts
• Ensure affordable housing inventory is aligned with public transportation planning

Led by community partner Ian Mance at The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, this team is visualizing the data used to discuss racial profiling patterns in crime enforcement across police departments in NC. The website is meant to be a tool for Police Chiefs and the public for monitoring good community policing practices. See their 1hr presentation here

The technology development started in 2014 with 3 core members - Colin Copeland, Andy Shapiro, and Dylan Young. The project has been lauded by the White House Police Data Initiative, and officially launched to the public December 16, 2015.

Durham Police Department Annual Report - Basically the goal was to make this report interactive and easier to consume.

Git Hub

Bike Safety App Memo (background and more details)

**Project Management Waffle Site

Problem

Isidro Razo, 49, was the latest bike rider to die on his way to work in Durham on May 25 on Angier Avenue. That makes four bike-related victims in the past 6 months in Durham. Despite deadly and risky biking conditions in Durham, the transition to a more bike-friendly community is slow and infrastructure budgets are not being accelerated. Policy makers need good data to know where to prioritize new bike plan infrastructure to make roadways safer. Bikers and would-be bikers need to know the safest routes and danger zones as they begin to bike more often to more places.

Solution

Create an application with color-coded bike routes based on relative risk of accidents using the NC bike crash database and biker reported incidents, based on # of crashes, time of day, etc. Highlight troublesome intersections.

Resources

• NC Bike Crash Data (2007-2012)
• Bike Lanes GIS Files

Working with Chris Mathews at Code for Raleigh - he's tracking a project as NC Connect

Durham Open Referral Memo (More details)

Problem Statement

The social safety net is fragmented. There are many small social programs and individual nonprofits that provide services, but those change regularly.The current system of directory updates is costly (manual intern labor pulls together updates), and the data collected are not available in open formats (i.e. interoperable and re-usable) that can be easily accessed by social workers and clients through a variety of interfaces.

Opportunity

The Open Referral Initiative is developing an interoperable format for structuring and sharing community resource data, and supporting pilot projects in which local stakeholders (organizations with a daily need for reliable community resource data) engage in a process of discovery and learning about the best means of establishing community resource data that is accessible, interoperable, reliable, and sustainable.

Intended Outcomes

Phase I - create an ‘ecosystem’ Decrease the collective costs of data production, by enabling various databases to ‘speak to’ and ‘read from’ a common format, and automatically circulating data between institutions. enabling service providers and users to submit updates of new information or flags of incorrect information. Increase the value of resource data by enabling it to be re-used via open APIs, which enable data to ‘flow’ across different kinds of systems.

Pilot Points of Contact

• Laura Marx, United Way NC, President
• Marti Morris, United Way NC, NC 211 Director, 704-996-0422
• Chris Mathews, Wake County DBA
• [Tentative] Debra Duncan, Alliance Behavioral Healthcare; manages Network of Care (http://durham.nc.networkofcare.org/mh/). Network of Care is the service directory for mental health that the county is currently funding

Before Nov 15/16, 2014, we gathered Hack Challenges from local Non-profit partners and aggregated useful data in a dedicated Socrata Open Data Portal for HackDuke, the largest Code for Good collegiate hackathon in the country. 500 developers from over 1400 registrants from top-tier C.S. students from Duke, VTech, GTech and engineers from Google, Citrix, Facebook and more. At the event, Code for Durham volunteers and community partners answered questions and mentored jr. devs. Supporting HackDuke is a great way to kickstart new projects and create valuable demonstrations on open data for Durham City & Counties open data program. It's also a great way to strengthen ties with the University.

Data Buckets & corresponding Challenge working docs (until we get our portal Setup):

• Poverty & Inequality
• Energy & Environment
• Education
• Health & Wellness

Our codefordurham.com website needs improving! We've now migrated over to this site which the master template is developed and hosted by Code for Philly brigade with a lot of support from Chris Alfano. Great opportunity to play with web dev.

Laddr framework discussion forum

Needs:

• Recaptcha Integration - How to (Laddr Forum)
• CSS/Design work
• Integration with other Code for Raleigh, Cary Laddr sites
• Update Project Template
• Profile Template Updates

Live Site:

• http://cfd-live.poplar.phl.io/
• http://cfd-live.poplar.phl.io/develop

Staging Site:

• http://cfd-staging.poplar.phl.io
• http://cfd-staging.poplar.phl.io/develop

Action items list is here (working doc)

NC Food Inspector started as a map-based website designed to give citizens easy access to current and past public health scores at restaurants in our community. The original project worked with Durham County to open up inspection data which can be used by an other groups as well here: data.dconc.gov

The currently active phase of the project is working with Wake County to integrate their data into the existing site and illustrate how the CDC's five risk factors of foodborne illness relate to a resturant's inspection score.

How you can help if you are a…..

• Citizen (Non-Tech) Opinions Needed : These tasks need non-technical, organization, brain-storming, contacting someone, some copy writing, or just help thinking about the task at hand. List of Opinion Tasks
• Frontend: These tasks will require maybe a little HTML, some CSS, a maybe little Javascript. List of Frontend Tasks
• Backend : The backend tasks will likely need help from someone with a little Ruby under their belt. List of Backend Tasks
• Design : These tasks will need someone who can find or make icons, and is familiar with CSS and hex coloring, or confidence organizing page layout and making a mockup. List of Design Tasks
• Data Analysis: List of Data Tasks

ALL TASKS

Project Overview

Why do we need to go to the city or county website to get info? Why can't they come to us, automagically? Let's work on this application that sends alerts/digests for crime, development activity and other timely data.

Description: CityGram is a one stop shop application where ALL citizens can subscribe for geo-centric alerts from various departments of their local government. City event notifications, Upcoming street closures, Permit violations, crime in their neighborhood, etc. This tool helps residents better understand what's going on in their area, when it's going to happen, and why. By providing timely information to residents in areas that are relevant to them, the city can be proactive instead of reactive.

Goal: Build trust through transparency, and increase civic engagement across the board. Dependencies: Good data flowing through Durham Open Data Portal with relevant datasets from different data sources.

Welcome!

This is how you can help

If you are a…

• Citizen/Tester (non-techie): Look at the "Backlog" list of needs to help fill gaps in the site to make the profiles more understandable
• Front-End Developer: Enhancements to v1
• Back-End Developer: List of needs
• Data Wrangler: Collect info for School Profiles; principal emails, etc
• UX / Designer: List of needs

Background

Durham School Navigator is web application tool to help parents understand the different public schools in Durham County and make informed schooling decisions. Durham School Navigator provides a common and easy-to-use platform for all public schools to share information about themselves with parents. The mapping web app provides a way to

• easily identify the Durham Public Schools (DPS) zoned schools based on a home location,
• determine the areas on the map these zones cover,
• and the distance to other magnet and charter options.

In addition the school profile survey to school principals, provides a common and easy-to-use platform for all public schools to share information about themselves with parents. Explore the sample school profile here

We have partnered with Durham Public Schools (DPS) to have them directly link to durhamschoolnavigator.org vs. the current mapping tool.

Durham Charter Collaborative, Durham PTA Council, and DPS are supporting Code for Durham in launching the School Navigator and the principal survey for the school profiles.

The code base for School Navigator is located at https://github.com/codefordurham/school-navigator. The README file shows links to documentation.