Heat Seek is #1 in the popular vote for the NYCBigApps competition! Thanks to everyone who has been supporting us this whole time and who voted. We are so grateful for all your support. Don’t forget to ask your friends to vote - the polls are open until tomorrow, July 19th at 3:30pm!
3D Printing Cases
We got the cases 3D printed! Keith, the Flatiron School alum at MakerBot, was able to get them printed out for us. William picked them up and brought them back for Daniel and Harold to use. The first one was a bit small and the lid didn’t shut properly, but the second one was a slam dunk! Jarryd got some stickers printed with the Heat Seek logo on them, and with the sticker the case looks top notch.
Sponsorships
We got officially sponsored by Personal Democracy Media and BetaNYC! We put their names up on the site next to the Flatiron School. It’s great having names we can point to and say, ‘these people believe in us’. We’re hoping for something of a snowball effect: the more sponsors we have, the more willing other organizations will be to sponsor us, too. We’re only asking sponsors to allow us to put their logo on our website, but we’re hoping that having their support will eventually help us to reach an even bigger audience when we launch a Kickstarter campaign.
Outreach Lead
We brought on a community outreach lead! We’ve been overwhelmed trying to reach out to all the community groups and advocacy groups who wanted to work with us, so we’re really excited to have Noelle on board to help out with that. She’s super qualified, having worked in non-profit for a few years in DC before coming to NYU Wagner to get a masters in Non-Profit Management and Public Policy. No doubt her NYU Wagner network will come in handy, seeing as it’s one of the top ten programs in the country.
Get-Out-The-Vote Campaign
We’re coming up on the semi-final round of the NYCBigApps competition, and we’re pressing hard to get out the vote. There are around 120 teams, but if we can be in the five most popular, we’ll get to present at the BigApps Battleground in front of a panel of influential players in the NYC tech scene. Of the five who present to them, one will be selected as the winner and will get an automatic pass to the finals in September. It’s a long shot, but we’re gonna give it our best. Luckily, we won’t be out of the running if we don’t make it; we can still go on to the finals if we do well in our category. We’re competing in the Live and Work categories because BigApps recommended we enter more than one in order to be more competitive. Obviously Heat Seek fits best in the Live category, but we’re happy to take their advice since they’ve told us that all of the judges use the same rubric, regardless of which category they’re judging.
Designing Sensor Cases
We’ve got a preliminary sensor case design. Daniel designed them in OpenSCAD, and Keith Williams, an alumnus from the Flatiron School who now works at MakerBot, offered to 3D print them for us. We’ve been back and forth a little about the dimensions and structuring it so that it doesn’t warp as the filament cools, but we should have something workable soon.
Presenting at BetaNYC Again!
We got invited back to BetaNYC to present about the progress we’ve made on the project in the past few months. Jarryd is prepping slides to go over with William before the presentation. We want to make sure it goes really well because we’re hoping that BetaNYC will sponsor the project. We may also get some help from people at the meetup who might be able to help out with the technical stuff.
Social Media Lead
With the get-out-the-vote effort and a lot of tweeting to do, we’ve brought on a social media lead who can help with our social media campaign. It’s incredibly hard to find social media people to do volunteer work, so we’re really lucky to have found Tom. Expect a lot more of us on your Facebook feed!
Redesigned Landing Site
Check out our new landing site! It’s pretty awesome. Andrea came up with some killer mockups and the developers really delivered. We’ve been showing it around and everyone loves it. This is leaps and bounds ahead of the bootstrap theme we’d slapped on it when we first started.
Flatiron School Bought Us More Hardware!
Thank you Flatiron School! the school has been tremendously supportive of the project and have yet again stepped in with some money and expertise. Sara Chipps, the best hardware hacker ever, gave us some sage guidance on what kind of hardware we might need and then authorized the school to pay for it all. Thank you Sara!
Mesh Networking with XBees
We’ve decided to go with mesh networking for the sensors to help bring the cost down. As it turns out, a significant portion of the cost of a sensor comes from its on-board wifi, so we thought, why have all the sensors in the building use wifi? Why not have most of them use something really cheap, like short-wave radio, and then let them all talk to one broadcasting base that communicates with our servers on behalf of all of them? Turns out, that’s called mesh networking, and it cuts our costs by around 50%. There’s a fairly easy solution for radio-wave based mesh networking out there called XBees - we’re looking into it.
Personal Democracy Forum
We went to the Personal Democracy Forum and Andrew Raseij introduced us to a guy from Microsoft who might be able to get us sponsored! Apparently if we can get a legal structure, Microsoft would consider giving us free cloud hosting, event space, software, and even funding. Looks like it’s time to find a lawyer who can help us draft up a mission statement and some bylaws. We had originally wanted to pursue 501©(3) status right away, but after talking with some people familiar with the process, it seems like fiscal sponsorship is the way to start. According to Grant Space:
Fiscal sponsorship is a formal arrangement in which a 501©(3) public charity sponsors a project that may lack exempt status. This alternative to starting your own nonprofit allows you to seek grants and solicit tax-deductible donations under your sponsor’s exempt status.
Based on the feedback we’ve been getting, it seems this is the route many non-profits take toward eventually getting their own 501©(3) status. We’re going to be looking into it in much more detail as soon as we’ve gotten a bit further along in the project. Its amazing to see how far we’ve come, and just how far we still have to go!
If you’ve gone through the process of getting fiscal sponsorship, or know of an organization that might be interested in sponsoring Heat Seek NYC, email us at info@heatseeknyc.com.
Front-End
We got a front-end developer named Ethan Ozelius to help with the mockups. He’s out of the country at the moment but once he gets back we should be able to get going. In the mean time, Andrea’s husband is stepping in to help code the mockups.
Cold Map
Tristan has rebuilt the coldmap of 311 heating complaint data in Leaflet and it looks great. We have it up on the site. We’re already planning out our next iteration, which will integrate our own data and become more interactive.
Meeting with Andrew Raseij
We met with Andrew Raseij, the chairman of the New York Tech Meetup and founder of Personal Democracy Media, at a coffee shop on 12th and Broadway. It seems so crazy that big players like him would have even heard of us, let alone ask us to meet them for coffee. We were really excited and brought most of the team. He said something we’ve been hearing from a lot of people, that what we’re doing is true civic hacking, not just another app to further clutter the internet, but something that really brings technology to problems of governance. He offered to help us network and fundraise, and even comped us all tickets to the Personal Democracy Forum with Edward Snowden (via satellite of course) and a bunch of other amazing speakers.
Business Development Lead
We got someone to handle all the business development and financing stuff for us. Jarryd is a former investment banker and currently an MBA student at Wharton. He’ll be helping with everything from outreach to web copy to hopefully teaching himself some basic coding, too. It’ll be really helpful to have someone on the team who can approach the roll out from a business perspective, rather than a tech perspective, so we’re really lucky to have him!
Mockups
Andrea came up with some killer mockups for the new user interface! We can’t wait to start implementing them. She’s been working with Tristan on coming up with a better UX for the app and they’re making great progress.
BigApps BigBuild
We went to a BigBuild event today for the NYCBigApps competition. We met a data scientist there named Ding Li who helped us get a draft of a coldmap we can use to show 311 heating complaint data using Tableau. We’re going to build a more robust version in Leaflet and integrate our own data showing where violations are actually occurring across New York City. It’s going to be really cool to see a visual representation of the 311 data, and hopefully it will allow us to do some targeted outreach to community organizations working in neighborhoods with the highest volume of complaints.
Design Lead
The BigApps competition is giving us some much needed structure. They’re encouraging us to bring on people with more diverse skill sets to strengthen the team, and because of that we just picked up a designer. Her name is Andrea Acevedo, she was at one of the BigApps events looking for a team to join. She’s an amazing graphic designer and we’re excited to have her on board! Our web app is about to get way more attractive.
Hardware Team
We recruited Daniel Kronovet and Harold Cooper to help us get the hardware cost down. If we can build our own hardware rather than using twines, we can cut the price per sensor down to about $20 - $40, rather than $125. Since we know we want to be able to offer the sensors free of charge, getting the cost down is going to be really important moving forward.
Daniel graduated with us from the Flatiron School and did a pretty cool hardware project that involved devising a system to detect when we needed to make more coffee in the communal coffee maker. He’s really excited about the project and we’re happy to have him helping out.
Harold is a friend of a friend who works at a hardware startup called Ringly, building software that talks to smart jewelry. He’s been in tech longer than everyone else on the team combined, so we’re super lucky to have him. Both Daniel and Harold have skills we desperately need, and we’re very excited that they’ll be working with us.