ryanbriones / civicneeds Goto Github PK

And create a contributor license agreement so that people are employed can contribute to the project.

Hi @ryanbriones,

@GovInTrenches pointed me to your video from the National Day of Civic Hacking event. I was emailing him and a few other folks asking where is the "home" of civic hacking, i.e. is there a rubygems/npm/bower of civic hacking and if not, should there be? In my mind I was picturing something like the bower registry (take's a while to load) where I could just hop on, dig through some projects, see what's active and what tech stack is being used and then dive into their GitHub page for more info. What you described in your talk with civic.json is basically the same thing I was imagining. So yes, some kind of civic.json registry is a big 👍 from me.

My only objection is that I think you should separate that work from the CivicNeeds form/site because I'm not sure if they're really addressing the same thing. They're kind of related but they're also kind of not. Obviously it would be great to have the description from the form end up in the civic.json file but I think anyone could just put that in there. I guess in my gut I feel like I've seen other civic hacking projects that amount to "submit your problem with X" but they fail to achieve any kind of network effect. I'm not trying to be discouraging I'm just thinking that maybe a better way to approach things would be:

• get the registry working first.
• get the metadata.
• then build the tools off of the metadata.

So put the word out there that devs working on civic projects should run a command to get their project in the registry and then if that idea sticks, figure out what the next step is. That's how things are working with npm and bower these days and it seems to work well.

Btw sorry if any of this comes off as rude or too frank, definitely not trying to be, I just really like the idea and wanted to give an honest opinion since it's something I've been thinking about as well.

🍰

I'd like to create a site that allows regular people, residents of Chicago, to submit problems or potential solutions to problems that could be solved with technology. The site would allow civic developers to browse these ideas, interact with the idea creator, and create project to help solve the problem.

Not everything is technology - some things we can't fix with an app. Just need a disclaimer somewhere.