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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The dean of the Flatiron School asked us to enter the NYCBigApps competition. They think we actually have a pretty good shot at winning, which would be amazing. The prize money would be enough to buy a lot of sensors for people who need them. We should really look at getting the cost down so we can have a bigger impact.
Everyone loved us at New York Tech Meetup - there are people coming out of the woodwork asking to help out with the project. We got so many business cards we don’t even know what to do with them. It’s crazy how this went from a school project to a serious piece of open source software almost by accident. The fact that the community is so excited about it really speaks to the need for more innovators out there designing tech solutions for community problems. Hacktivism, digital advocacy, whatever you want to call it - we’re really excited to be a part of it and using our tech skills to improve lives.
We’ve been selected to present at the largest meetup in the world! Crazy. We only had one day’s notice so we’ve got to really cram for this presentation. Looks like we’ll be spending the entire day going over the demo; it’s crazy to think that thousands of people will be seeing this.
We got approved to present at BetaNYC! They want us to do a 5 minute lightning talk, so we’ll have to cut out about two thirds of the presentation, but it’s still super exciting. BetaNYC is a perfect place to present because its specifically focused on technology, civic engagement, and community service. You can read more about their other awesome projects here.
Now that we’ve got deployment mastered, we thought it would be good to set up continuous deployment. William connected our repo to CodeShip and now any time we push to master it redeploys so long as our test suite passes. It’s been great.
We finally deployed! We gave up on figuring out multipacks and deployed to Digital Ocean instead of Heroku. It took a whole day and lots of advice. But now there are no more missing readings due to William’s computer being down. Major progress.
Our presentation went really well! It got such a good reception in fact that the dean of the school told us to apply to present it at New York Tech Meetup. It’s the largest meetup in the world and has a huge audience, so I’m sure we won’t get in, but we might be able to get into some smaller meetups. We’re also going to apply to present at BetaNYC. Wish us luck!
Tristan’s been pounding away at the UI. He taught himself Bootstrap and has been getting help from Jon Grover, the front-end instructor at the Flatiron School. The app is starting to look pretty nice actually, and he’s got some fancy AJAX and client side javascript to make things sleek.
