Matthew Laznicka
Greg Tracy wanted to know if his bus was on time.
Tracy, who commutes by bus to his job downtown at Propeller Health when he cannot ride his bike, says the arrival times provided by Madison Metro were frequently off by several minutes.
"I routinely missed the bus and for not obvious reasons," says Tracy. "Everybody that rides the bus gets stuck at some point."
His solution -- his "hack" -- was SMSMyBus, a text messaging application that gives riders real-time arrival estimates. Simply provide a stop number and voilÃ, a reply appears with route numbers and arrival times calculated using GPS data.
Launched in 2010, SMSMyBus has since developed into an application programming interface (API) that connects to other messaging platforms like email and Google Chat. It also underpins transit data within iOS and Android apps like Transit and Mobile UW. Tracy says his API made over 90 million requests for arrival times in 2014.
For Tracy, the experience crystallized a simple truth: Technically proficient people can have a huge impact on civic services, and it doesn't have to cost them a ton of time or money.
"I was like, 'oh my gosh, this is fantastic,'" he says. "This is a totally new way to volunteer. There's a bunch of people here who are doing this in their spare time, and we should create an organization around it. We'll call ourselves HackingMadison, and we'll try to do more of these projects."
Four years later, HackingMadison still exists and occasionally hosts meetups and events. But tech leaders inside and outside the group acknowledge there's been a hiatus in the local civic hacking scene. Some say the city should make more data available to the public, while others suggest looking to programs in other cities.
"We're in a bit of a lull in the civic hacking community," says Steven Faulkner, who built on Tracy's efforts by constructing a kiosk in Mother Fool's Coffeehouse that displays live bus data. "The core contingent has been very busy. The community needs to step up and do more."
Gamification
With a population of 6,353 -- a shade larger than that of Cottage Grove -- nobody is going to mistake Manor, Texas, for Silicon Valley. But Manor, located about 15 miles outside of Austin, was for years an innovator in incentivizing residents to participate in government. This kind of interaction is key to civic hacking.
Dustin Haisler served as Manor's chief information officer from 2006 to 2010. During that time he and other city leaders partnered with Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab to develop and implement Manor Labs, a program that crowdsourced ideas for improving the city. If Manor decided to use a suggestion, it rewarded the creator with "innobucks," a virtual civic currency that could be redeemed for things like meals donated by local eateries and police ride-alongs.
"A big part of the challenge when it comes to citizen engagement is the psychology of getting someone to engage," says Haisler. "There needs to be some type of trigger to change behavior, and for us that was innobucks. For people to participate, we needed to do something concrete and show value."
Three years ago, Manor Labs was taken offline by city officials whom Haisler calls "very anti-transparency." "[They] didn't want a dedicated portal for constituents to voice their opinions," Haisler says.
But that doesn't mean the concept failed. Making local government feel like a game can stoke civic engagement by tapping into citizens' inborn competitiveness, says Forrest Woolworth, chief operating officer at Madison mobile gaming company PerBlue.
"A lot of people perceive city [government] as a big bureaucratic thing that no matter what you do, you're not going to be able to change anything," Woolworth says. "Gamification can help people get over that passiveness by individually incentivizing them."
But a city doesn't have to create a game or new currency to get citizens involved. A very easy first step is to simply make the data it already has available, and let people experiment with it.
Beyond screen scraping
Data is the fuel that's needed to make the civic hacking engine run. To create SMSMyBus, Tracy got the GPS data he needed from Madison Metro's website using a technique called "screen scraping," which involves converting data from web pages into a programmable format. Tracy says this "makes it super simple for programmers to go find the buses," then come up with new applications for displaying bus data, potentially in combination with other, unrelated datasets.
This extra first step takes time, but Tracy says that for years, screen scraping was one of the few ways to tackle problems requiring city data. However, that changed in 2012 when Madison passed an open data ordinance and created an open data portal containing datasets from municipal agencies like the police department and assessor's office. According to data.gov, Madison is one of only 37 cities with an open data site.
The most important characteristic of an open data portal is the ability to access the underlying information in machine-readable form, says Aneesh Chopra, who from 2009 to 2012 served in President Obama's administration as the first U.S. chief technology officer.
"The reason that's critical is largely on the premise that value is often at the intersection of multiple datasets," says Chopra.
Though it has gained traction in recent years, the open data movement -- where governments make large amounts of data publically available -- is actually decades in the making, Chopra says. The Weather Channel, which launched in 1982, is built on open machine-readable access to raw weather data maintained by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Chopra says this is likely where open data is headed: governments focusing on putting data out there and seeing what people do with it.
When people are given free rein to play with public data, they sometimes create elegant, useful products without eating up government resources. "The recurring theme I hear, no matter [the source], is that city staff is overworked," says Brad Grzesiak, who is CEO at Madison software development shop Bendyworks and has helped organize civic hacking events.
The need to access public data touches all levels of government. Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison) says she's planning to introduce a bill that would require all data statewide that's otherwise accessible through an open records request to be electronically accessible and machine-readable.
"What I'm really looking to do is spur the creation of applications," Taylor says. "You can't use data that's saved in PDFs or certain other file formats. It needs to be usable so that people can [ask], 'What's the cleanest lake?' or 'What lake has the most of whatever fish you're looking for and what are the best times to fish?' There's a lot of good DNR data in particular that might be very usable for apps."
Taylor says citizens would save money if public documents were more widely available. "You can go get it," she says. "You don't have to do an open records request."
Inside the data portal
Although Madison's city government collects and maintains a treasure trove of data, very little of it is available through the city's open data portal. To date, it contains just 103 datasets, although this number continues to grow.
Ald. Scott Resnick, who is challenging Paul Soglin for mayor, says the city can and should add more. For example, he points to two datasets in the city of Chicago's data portal: "Potholes Patched -- Last Seven Days" and "Affordable Rental Housing Developments."
"You would think as we talk about affordable housing here, that should absolutely be a dataset [in our portal]," says Resnick. "And the pothole data shows city employees working efficiently. It's not that the city of Madison doesn't [collect] this data -- we just don't put it through our open data portal."
Being able to access multiple Madison city departments' data from one place would be ideal for things like house hunting, says Ald. Maurice Cheeks. He says it would be useful to be able to tell, for instance, "Where's a house that's within two blocks of a bus stop, has a basketball court and grocery store in walking distance, above-average diversity and below-average crime?"
David Schmiedicke, Madison's finance director, says his department is planning to hire a citywide data projects coordinator. He says part of this person's duties will be to "make and defend substantive recommendations on the way departments collect and share data," and "reduce data silos across departments."
City workers have faced criticism for not using the portal enough to become aware of its shortcomings.
"I think the portal would be a lot more powerful if city employees actually used it themselves," says Erik Paulson, a leader in the HackingMadison group. Paulson serves on the city's Digital Technology Committee, which is trying to figure out where to improve Internet connectivity. In one meeting, Paulson says, city staff presented around 20 maps with demographic information.
"They were all fantastic," Paulson says. "I asked, 'Did you use the open data portal to create these?' And the answer was, 'No, we use the same data that's in there but we use different tools.' I think what they would discover if they tried to use the portal is that there's just enough little things wrong that you can't actually use it for a lot of things."
"I think Erik has a good point," says Sarah Edgerton, who works in the city's information technology department as web team manager. She confirms that her colleagues used geographic information system (GIS) tools, rather than the portal, to make the maps. But she defends the decision, saying the mapping capabilities of the portal -- really, those of Socrata, the underlying software -- aren't up to snuff. "Socrata isn't real strong with mapping," she says. "That's why they chose to use our GIS. That's the tool that we'll be using [in the future]."
Edgerton says the city has put more data online recently, such as restaurant and retail food store health inspection reports, which are now available through a lookup tool on the Public Health Madison & Dane County website.
However, this information not being on the portal makes it cumbersome for civic hackers to incorporate into, say, a smartphone app.
That's exactly what Max Stoller did in 2010, when he was a junior computer science major at New York University. His Donteat.at app notifies users when they've checked into a New York restaurant that the eatery has a poor health code grade or is in danger of being shut down.
Stoller developed Donteat.at for NYC BigApps, an annual app-making competition using New York City's cornucopia of public data. Donteat.at won an honorable mention in the contest.
"That is a great example of open data and the potential for collaboration with the developer community," says Rachel Haot, who at the time was the city's chief digital officer (CDO) and is now New York state's CDO and deputy secretary for technology.
Hacking collective
Chris Skudlarczyk lives in Denver and doesn't rely on Madison Metro. Nevertheless, the SMSMyBus API that Tracy created piqued his interest.
"The transit API caught my attention because it was an awesome example of how developers can improve their community," says Skudlarczyk. "I just decided to start hacking on it."
In addition to fetching bus data, the API can also ping the city parking utility and UW Transportation Services for real-time parking data, like the number of vacant stalls in a particular garage or lot.
Initially the API only provided parking info from the city. Skudlarczyk travels to Madison at least once a year with his wife, Veronica, a UW alum. He says he loves the city and thought he could augment Tracy's efforts. So he added parking data from the UW.
Skudlarczyk's enhancements underscore an important characteristic of the hacking community -- it values not just the sharing of data, but also resources and ideas. This philosophy is demonstrated when developers make their code public, known as "open-source" code.
Skudlarczyk says improving the API was also an opportunity to build his portfolio.
"Working on an open-source project is one of best ways to establish a resume as a developer," Skudlarczyk says. "So a lot of us in the field usually have something going on the side as a way to build out our profile and improve our skills."
While help can come from unexpected places like Denver, talents can also be deliberately corralled in competitions and events. HackingMadison has hosted hackathons similar to NYC BigApps, minus the prizes. CityHack is an event in which developers "work on day-long projects that make Madison a better place to live." It last took place in 2013 at the Central Library and was championed by Bendyworks and Hardin Design & Development.
Resnick, who is Hardin's chief operating officer, says he'd like to see more of these gatherings.
"Other communities are having weekly hackathons where developers are talking with city employees side-by-side to come up with new ideas," he says. "We could be doing so much more when it comes to data and civic apps."
Making money
A sense of civic duty is what drives many of Madison's civic hackers to create digital tools aimed at improving their hometown. They use lofty rhetoric like "giving back" and "public service" to explain why they choose to lend their free time and programming expertise to these projects. In other words, they want to "do good."
But some of them also think about "doing well" -- finding ways to make money off of civic hacks.
SOLOMO Technology, headquartered in Madison, makes location-based software that allows businesses to track customers and send content to their smartphones.
"We're able to make touch points [with] sensors," says Kevin Kiser, SOLOMO's director of marketing. "A specific mobile app on your phone could be tied to these particular sensors, and then we could send content through that app to your phone."
Suppose Macy's licenses SOLOMO's software; a woman shopping at a sensor-equipped Macy's store who has the Macy's app on her phone could receive department-specific offers based on her location.
Now suppose Madison Metro licenses SOLOMO's software; the bus company could send content -- most likely promotions or ads -- to riders through any of the bus-tracking mobile apps.
"I think it would be awesome to use [SOLOMO's] technology on the buses to drive revenue. For instance, if you take the bus down West Washington Avenue, then maybe [on a Wednesday] it says, 'Team Trivia at Echo Tap. Be sure you come tomorrow,'" says James Lloyd, a developer and entrepreneur who has worked on small government-related projects like muniQA, a forum he created for cities to share information with one another.
The revenue Lloyd refers to might allow Metro to lower fares or put Wi-Fi on more buses, but the trade-off for riders would be yet another stream of notifications. Kiser says SOLOMO has patents that "allow revocation of information and allow consumers to opt out."
Asked about ad fatigue, he says it's a valid concern, but SOLOMO is not the one pulling the levers. "This easily could become like how email has been spammed like crazy. It's the responsibility of the business to not do that."
Steven Faulkner, who built the bus kiosk at Mother Fool's, is of a different mind.
"I'm all about trying to make things more accessible and efficient," he says. "When you start getting into revenue, for me that's a turn-off. That goes against what I see as the ethos of civic hacking."
Code for Madison?
One tool new to Madison that came about through a civic hack in Boston is Adopt-A-Hydrant, which allows citizens to take responsibility for clearing snow and leaves off of fire hydrants in their neighborhoods. It was created through Code for America, a nonprofit that pairs software developers with governments to work on short-term projects.
Grant Smith, who worked most recently at EatStreet, a Madison company that makes food-ordering software, moved to California in January after he was named a Code for America 2015 fellow. He's been paired with the city of West Sacramento and says his team will focus on food and agriculture.
"The aim [is] to support entrepreneurship in agriculture and better connect people to the sources of their food," Smith says. "The Sacramento Valley region produces 150% by volume the amount of food that the region consumes, yet the vast majority of food is brought in from outside. They're interested in facilitating more community-supported agriculture programs and other things that can return food to the community directly and more efficiently."
Mayor Soglin says Madison considered bringing in a Code for America fellow to work on local food issues but decided against it because "the cost was not worth the benefits."
Faulkner says food sourcing is an issue he'd like to see the city address.
"We have some disparities when it comes to food," says Faulkner. "There's places that have access to healthy, local, organic food, and then there's places that don't. Can we write an app that would connect farmers, retailers and consumers?"
Greg Tracy agrees. He says that having a Code for America fellow work with the city could have ripple effects.
"You should make a commitment to bring in a Code for America fellow," he says. "They can work with HackingMadison and create a groundswell of energy that might produce more than just what the fellow brings. That person and that organization could rally everybody at the same time and do a lot of good," he says. "Some things you should just pay for."
