Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Leveraging SeeClickFix Open Content for Hurricane Recovery Projects

To say that we've been busy here at SeeClickFix this past week would be an understatement. As a no-brainer service to communities affected by Hurricane Sandy, we have been waiving all setup and software license fees for local governments that wanted to leverage the power of our crowd-sourced data platform in response and recovery efforts. In similar fashion, we have been waiving license fees for our premium, ad-free content widgets, for local, regional, and national media outlets that wanted to use our tools raise awareness of critical community problems with their readers.

 Going one step further, we wanted to make all SeeClickFix storm-related reports available to any developers who want to leverage them for their own projects. To that end, we got connected early on with the #HurricaneHackers, a spontaneously connected group of software developers who were brainstorming and building online tools related to Hurricane Sandy.  I want to take a moment to briefly outline the self-serve content partnership opportunities we presented to the tech community.

Content Options

For the purpose of leveraging SeeClickFix content for a storm-related hack/project, we currently have three options to choose from:

1) Ready-made Widgets

The self-serve SeeClickFix widget generator allows anyone who runs a website to take advantage of our content on their own website.  We have three types of widgets to choose from:
  • Text widget (list only, optionally linking to a map widget landing page)
  • Map widget, advanced (with issue list and report)
  • Map widget, simple (to be deprecated)
To create a storm-related issue widget, you can use the filter by keyword feature to include only issues that mention the following:
hurricane,storm,sandy,flood,power,electricity
You can see live examples of SeeClickFix storm issue maps on  The Huffington Post, NBC (Washington, Philadelphia, Connecticut), Boston.com, Philly.com, The Hour (Fairfield County, CT), and CT News Junkie.

 Note, for these widgets related that to Hurricane Sandy, we will upgrade you to our premium ad-free platform at no charge.

2) RSS Feeds

 We have a few different RSS feeds, each based off the URL slug of the place in question on our website.  For example, the New York City SeeClickFix place page is seeclickfix.com/new-york), so the RSS feeds would be the following:
Again, make sure you start by searching for the neighborhood, town, city, county, or state in question at seeclickfix.com, in order to get get the exact address spelling for the place in question.


3) API

 Obviously, for a custom software development project/mashup, you might need more flexibility than what it offered with our off-the-shelf widgets and RSS feeds.  For these projects, we invite developers to take advantage of the SeeClickFix API.
For example, for a list of the most recently reported storm-related issues in a certain area (e.g. New York City), you could make one of the following API calls:



To retrieve details of a specific issue (e.g. "311 busy, nyc.gov website not working"), you could make one of the following API calls:

Ideas

Do you have ideas for a SeeClickFix storm-related hack project? Get in touch, we'll try to help in any way we can.

Support

If you need direct assistance with leveraging SeeClickFix content for your website or project, please contact me at @zbeat or zack [at] seeclickfix [dot] com. Again, if you're using a widget related to the hurricane, be sure to reach out to have us remove the banner ads free of charge.

-Zack
at

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