This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in one of the most well-run, well-equipped, and well-intentioned hackathons that I've ever been a part of, Hack Red Hook in Brooklyn, NYC. This was a civic hack aimed at bringing together local stakeholders in the community of Red Hook with technologists and designers from outside the neighborhood. Hosted by Pioneer Works, an organization in support of collaboration, art, and education for the community, about 100 hackers descended on the waterfront to tackle topics such as flood emergency response, lighting infrastructure, crime, and citizen outreach. Using scriptr.io as a backbone, my team (Ed Borden and Andy An, in conjunction with PortSide New York) was able to bring home the "Best in Transportation" prize for HighGround.nyc, a system that manages vehicle evacuation during emergency flooding situations. Read on for more!

For the neighborhood of Red Hook, there's no ambiguity to how storm surges will affect residents. Sandy's effects were thoroughly mapped (below) by Jim McMahon, a Red Hook local. FEMA's post-Sandy updated flood risk maps show Red Hook as a big splotch of red. Very little of Red Hook didn't end up underwater, and so residents look to the city not just an evacuation plan for its people, but one for its vehicles as well. This was our goal.

We spent quite a lot of time understanding this problem and devising a solution in conjunction with Carolina Salguero of PortSide NewYork, an educational non-profit based on board a historic tanker berthed right across the street from Pioneer Works. PortSide NewYork was integral to the area's recovery during the aftermath of the storm and had first-hand experience with this problem set.

See interview on vimeo

Part 2: Notification System Residents need a way to know when Emergency Flood Parking protocols are in effect. NYC has channels for this type of communication already (NYC 311, etc), but we built in both SMS and on-street notifications for this prototype. Our disco LCD sign (complete with 3D printed enclosure designed and produced by my teammate Andy An) was pretty fun to build.

The notification system for our prototype was controlled by a scriptr.io endpoint, which I manually ran during the demo but could also be connected to a button in an administration UI somewhere. This endpoint, the "switch", toggles a value in a Firebase instance (which is initialized by another scriptr.io script) which lets all the connected mobile clients know to change over to "flood mode", as well as issues the SMS alerts via Twilio.

See demo on vimeo

Part 3: Real-time sensing of parking availability

When an emergency hits and thousands of people are scrambling to move their vehicle out of harm's way, there will undoubtedly be a major risk of congestion. This is where we envisioned connecting to GE's Current Lamps, one potential way of sensing parking availability in a very flexible way in real-time. These lamps use image processing on feeds coming from embedded cameras inside the lights to sense cars, which would be a great option for providing sensor coverage on a highway or semi-remote bike path. Scriptr.io just released a connector library for GE's Predix platform, making an integration into the HighGround.nyc prototype easy.

Part 4: A smart "traffic cop" AI in the cloud Absolutely critical will be the management of directing vehicles to available spots in an efficient way based on availability, distance of vehicles, vehicles' relationships to each other, and traffic and other hazards. This will require a reactive system, which could be based on scriptr.io's ability to subscribe microservices to each other or our Finite State Machines.

Part 5: Mobile application The end result of all of the infrastructure and backend logic is to ultimately get the right information to the driver. To do that, we built a full-fledged EmberJS application that allows for subscription to the service during a non-emergency state and access to the parking guidance during a flood. Driven by real-time Firebase data (see our blog on scriptr.io -> Firebase integration) and the group of scriptr.io endpoints that constituted our "API", we were able to demo a live flood scenario to the audience at the end of the event where they were able to view the available parking spaces (which changed in real-time as I manipulated the database) and see their recommended destination.

This was a mass of work for two people to accomplish in just a part of a weekend! This was really only possible due to the pre-baked integrations between scriptr.io and the various services we used, and the ability to instantly spin up and debug Javascript endpoints in the scriptr.io IDE. Deployment and orchestration between the various parts was cake. All of the code is available in our Github repository and some other info and assets are on our devpost page.

We really hope this project starts the conversation around a real solution for Red Hook! Please contact PortSide NewYork if you are interested in collaborating further!