Add data to City Gram

[sarabehunek]

Austin has 3-1-1 data available on City Gram (https://www.citygram.org/), but there is an opportunity to review the data on the Open Data Portal, identify datasets that could be offered through CityGram, and to link them up.

Providing additional data on City Gram is a great way to put the City's data to use and to make citizens more aware of what's going on in their area.

City staff would could provide expertise about the available data, but needs help from Open Austin to link the data to City Gram.

[mateoclarke]

Live site: https://www.citygram.org/austin

Currently you can only subscribe to 311 notifications... but let's add more!

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I was able to connect with @bigfleet who helps maintain the Citygram project. He pointed me to some info about what it takes to add more datasets to Citygram.

The family of middleware like Austin would be producing is here: https://github.com/citygram/citygram-services

This is the specific middleware file that currently is connecting the Socrata 311 data to the Citygram service. https://github.com/citygram/citygram-services/blob/master/lib/spy_glass/registry/austin-311.rb

For more info on the Citygram Connector (aka Spyglass) here's a README.

It’s maybe 30 lines of code typically to bring a new dataset online. Pretty low effort, but requires getting Ruby installed, knowing how to start a server, etc.

The Citygram code itself is at: https://github.com/codeforamerica/citygram

There's good documentation there. Like... https://github.com/codeforamerica/citygram/wiki/Citygram-Dataset-Best-Practices https://github.com/codeforamerica/citygram/wiki/Going-Live#adding-your-datasets-to-the-database https://github.com/codeforamerica/citygram/wiki/Citygram-Dataset-Best-Practices#for-best-results

Steps:

1. identify datasets to add.
   • Crime incidents, road closures, etc seem like good candidates.
   • @sarabehunek Do you have any ideas or candidate data sets??
2. Recruit Ruby proficient coder(s) to add a new registry file which acts as an adapter between the Socrata endpoint and the Citygram service
   • Here is the current example for 311 data.
3. Submit a Pull Request against citygram-services.
   • The simplest example PR that could get merged: https://github.com/citygram/citygram-services/pull/56
   • Doing this contains a gist to an incantation that brings it online and saves work for @bigfleet.