Web / Tech
Custom CitySourced Facebook Widgets
Nov 14th
Note: This Article will not be maintained or updated. For the most up to date instructions see our Knowledge Base Article.
In addition to our mobile apps and web forms, CitySourced customers can create a custom Facebook App to allow citizens to report new issues directly from Facebook. This how-to tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to create a tab on a Facebook page for reporting new issues directly within Facebook. Follow this easy three step process to create your own version.
How Smartphones are Used {Infographic}
Oct 8th
Smartphones are everywhere. For many of us, the devices have become an extension of our being. We text, check movie times, and check-in our current location. It’s natural and comfortable for us to pull out our mobiles and send out tweet or status update. But have you ever stopped to considered which activities dominate on the smartphone? The team at Tatango created the following infographic with data compiled from the Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project
Steve Jobs’ Influence on CitySourced
Oct 6th
Most of you, and especially those in the tech world, have heard the news that we lost one of the great ones. The passing of Steve Jobs will bring many articles and stories about his legacy. Many will describe how his vision and the Apple technology drove our society into the greatest technology era ever. But, that’s not the focus of this post; instead, I’d like to discuss how Steve Jobs personally influenced us here at CitySourced. Our CEO, Jason Kiesel, said it best:
via @jasonkiesel
4-H & Fish & Wildlife Service Partners with CitySourced to Collect Baseline Data for San Diego Bay Restoration
Jul 8th
With some spare time and some eager volunteers, it’s super easy to collect data around virtually anything with the CitySourced platform.
On Friday July 8th 2011, 4-H youth (Geo-spatial leadership team) from 7 states assisted US Fish + Wildlife staff to collect base line data for the 10 year restoration plans for the San Diego Bay Salt Marsh Refuges. 4-H youth and their adult volunteer leaders pioneered the use of GPS enabled smart phones using “easy to use” community data application collection app developed by CitySourced.
The results are fascinating and with the help of some free tools from Esri, you can mash them up on virtually any type of map and share them with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. You can even embed the results in your own website (like we did here).
View Larger Map
By the end of the day, the 4-H team of Teens took the data collected using the CitySourced location based mobile reporting platform), and imported the into an online map at arcgis.com. ArcGIS online was able to automatically pick up the meta-data (species type, latitude, longitude, etc.) in the data stream and embed that into the map as well. All that was left was choosing a basemap (satellite imagery, street imagery, etc.) and voila!, the map is created. This data will be used for analysis, display and decision making by US Fish & Wildlife Service planners and managers.
Esri is doing some pretty incredible things with their technology and partner ecosystem, and we’re honored to be collaborating with all of these folks. To learn more about what 4-H is doing with geo-spatial check out 4-H.org.
Stay tuned for more important projects like this one!
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*Use by 4-H of any specific commercial products or services does not constitute or imply endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by 4-H National Headquarters, NIFA, USDA or the United States Government.
CitySourced Now Available on Windows Phone 7 (WP7)
Dec 16th
We finally got the word yesterday that our application, CitySourced, is now approved and available for download from the Windows Phone Marketplace. With all of our experience in mobile development, I must say (and of course I am biased), that developing for WP7 was an absolute dream. We’re a .NET shop so we’re very familiar with the Visual Studio IDE, the best IDE on the market currently hands down in my opinion. We could get into an argument over this – what about Eclipse or XCode or this or that? They all completely blow when compared to Visual Studio. Microsoft has really outdone themselves with VS2010. Anyway, I digress.
After downloading the required plugins for VS2010 to develop WP7 applications (I’ll make a separate blog post on my personal blog about that), we were off and running. We already had all the back end services created and working since we’re on the other platforms, so all we needed to worry about was the client end. WP7 applications are based on Silverlight and XAML, and while this is not my forte, I had taken a WPF & Silverlight bootcamp up at Microsoft in Redmond a few years ago.
All in all, it took us about 4 weeks to get our application wired up and working. Granted, there was no back end work to be done, but 4 weeks is pretty incredible (and I wasn’t working on it full time – probably 75% of my time). I brought in some outside help with James Richards, a really talented developer that has been working with us on many of the Esri components. We had about a week to clean up some final bugs, and we’ve finally passed the approval process. The approval process was great too. Our application just so happened to fail twice (I admit, I didn’t read the entire submission guide…), but the great thing about Microsoft’s approval process is that they give you a detailed report as to why the application failed and the steps to reproduce it! Having only dealt with Apple until now, all I have to say to that is “Wow”. Apple could definitely learn a thing or two from Microsoft when it comes to the app approval process.
So if you’re a mobile developer, and you’re wondering if you should take the dive into the world of WP7, our recommendation would be to go for it. From a developer standpoint, it was a great experience. And if you’re a .NET/C# developer, you’ll be cursing Apple and Objective-C and wondering why it wasn’t this easy to begin with. Microsoft definitely got a win on this one.
CitySourced Integrates San Francisco’s Open 311 System
May 5th
Mobile phone app connects citizens directly to city services
San Francisco — May 5th, 2010 — CitySourced, a real time mobile civic engagement company and a finalist at the 2009 TechCrunch50 conference, announced today that its innovative mobile phone application is now integrated with the San Francisco Open311 API to send reports from CitySourced directly to San Francisco’s 311 system. 311 systems allow citizens to connect directly with non-emergency government offices. This is an unprecedented public/private partnership that captures the essence of the Gov2.0 movement. This means citizens will be able to quickly photograph important issues in their community with their smart phones and receive feedback on when their issues get resolved. In addition to the photo, the CitySourced application delivers the physical address of the issue via GPS coordinates, date/time stamp, and the report type (graffiti, trash, pothole, etc.). CitySourced aims to reduce the amount of calls that come into city hall, helping to reduce costs, increase efficiency, as well as make it easier for city employees to verify issues using the rich data. The Open311 API allows CitySourced to take the initiative and deliver value through its application to the city of San Francisco. “CitySourced is changing the way citizens interact with city services,” said Chris Vein, City CIO. “The CitySourced application will give San Franciscans the power and ability to instantly report city issues, not only empowering their role as citizens, but making the city an even better and safer place to live.” In March 2010, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom launched Open311 API, allowing software developers to write web applications that interact directly with city departments.
CitySourced for San Francisco is available right now for free download in the Apple iTunes app store as ‘San Francisco 311′, and is launching in Q2 2010 on Blackberry & Android. CitySourced currently allows citizens in over 1900 cities nationwide to directly deliver citizen reports to city council and public works via e-mail. CitySourced is powered by FreedomSpeaks, the largest database of public officials in the United States. CitySourced has official integration with districts in San Jose and Los Angeles, California. Additional major cities have signed up to the service and are coming online in Q2 2010.
About CitySourced:
CitySourced is a real time mobile civic engagement tool. CitySourced provides 1) a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civic issues graffiti, trash, potholes etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution; 2) an opportunity for government to use technology to save money and be more accountable to those they govern; and 3) a positive, collaborative platform for real civic action. The platform is called CitySourced, as it empowers ordinary citizens to crowd source solutions for common civic issues. CitySourced is powered by FreedomSpeaks, the leader in interactive civic engagement.
For more information about CitySourced, including images, please visit CitySourced.com
For more information about FreedomSpeaks, please visit FreedomSpeaks.com
Contact: Kurt Daradics
Phone 323-540-4007
Email: kurt@citysourced.com
CitySourced to Leverage Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform for their Government Customers
Feb 23rd
We got a very nice mention in Microsoft’s Public Sector Weblog today!
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CitySourced to Leverage Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform for their Government Customers
CitySourced has selected Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform as the foundation for their application infrastructure..
We will do a detailed blog-post over the next month or two, but below is a short one about FreedomSpeaks/CitySourced, goals to address their future needs, and broad outline of their plans to leverage Microsoft’s suite of Windows Azure services.
Background about the organization and the service – CitySourced is a real time mobile civic engagement tool. The CitySourced suite of applications has three main components. 1) The Console, which provides an administrative extranet for government agencies to manage the incoming customer support requests; 2) The Website, a consumer facing website encouraging citizens to engage with their local government as well as providing complete transparency to their government’s day-to-day operations; 3) A Smartphone application that enables citizens and residents to submit non-emergency service requests (i.e., potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) directly to their local government. The CitySourced platform presents a unique opportunity for government to use technology to both save money and improve accountability to those they govern. It also creates a positive, collaborative platform for real action. The mission of CitySourced is to transform civic engagement and enable citizens to make their communities a better place.
Here are some of the goals/drivers that led CitySourced to adopt cloud-based offering:
- CitySourced’s application utilized multi-layered architecture based on Microsoft ASP.NET on Windows Server 2003/IIS6.0 and SQL Server 2005 on three servers. CitySourced continues to get a lot of visibility in various cities around the country, and needed a plan to implement a scalable cloud based solution to handle the anticipated future demand.
- Focus was more on deliver better service and high-value features to both the government and consumer entities, so the goal was to stay away from hardware/software acquisition, management and monitoring of the infrastructure and the application.
- CitySourced also wanted to improve back-end job-processing service and log storage.
- CitySourced explored several options with the key goal being to avoid making major changes to their application code-base, in-memory cache layer and database layer.
- All of the above helped CitySourced choose Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform to host and manage the CitySourced application.
Goals & plans for Phase 1: (To be completed by March, 2010)
· Migrate the entire application infrastructure to Azure (web, cache, and databases) with a minimum amount of disturbance to their core business processes.
· Migrate with a minimal amount of refactoring to existing code (focusing on system changes, not code changes).
Goals & plans for Phase 2: (To be completed by May, 2010)
· Leverage Windows Azure Storage & Tables for more scalable storage of logs and other binary data (such as serialized hash tables and image blobs).
· Migrate their existing homegrown (and database dependent) queue workflow to Windows Azure Queue services.
· Offload jobs processing from Window’s based services onto dedicated worker instances.
Benefits & End-Result- CitySourced is confident that a cloud computing solution based on Microsoft Windows Azure will enable them to deliver better service to a broader audience (more customers) without worrying about infrastructure, software acquisition and service management.
High-Level architecture of their next-generation solution:
We Made the Finals for the Knight News Challenge!
Feb 23rd
We were encouraged to read this e-mail from the fine folks at the Knight Foundation.
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Dear Mr. Kralik – We have completed our review of your application to the Knight News Challenge.Congratulations! You have been selected to complete a full proposal.
Please remember that the Knight News Challenge contest requires several more steps before a final decision is made. This letter does not indicate that you have been selected to receive a grant.
You must complete your proposal form complying with the character limits and e-mail it along with your supporting materials by February 7, 2010.
Are You .NET Ninja? Come Work for Us!
Feb 18th
CitySourced, a software company based in Sherman Oaks, CA has an immediate need for a software engineer. We develop web and mobile solutions that directly impact your community. Our software is based on Microsoft technologies, particularly C# and .NET. The applications we develop place a heavy emphasis on user interface and interactive graphical functionality built for the exacting needs of the consumer and government sectors. Your compensation will include a blend of both cash (yeah, money!) and equity.
If you are excited by the opportunity to have a direct effect on you and your neighbor’s quality of life, CitySourced may be the place for you. You will be responsible for the design, development and testing of new software products as well as supporting existing, released products.
Our environment is fast-paced, having product delivery cycles measured in weeks rather than months. You will not be given a 300 page specification and told to “implement this.” Instead, you will be given a general task, and it is up to you to design, validate, implement and test. If something you worked on doesn’t work, it’s your responsibility. You will be working closely with other members of the development staff to extend the core functionality, designed and implemented over the past 7 years, to power new products and take existing products “to the next level.”
Requirements
- A bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or equivalent work experience.
- Proven Windows development experience in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET technologies, particularly C#.
- Experience using OO methodologies in designing software solutions.
- Strong ability to analyze vague problem descriptions and formulate effective solutions. Be able to work with analyze a need and engineer a solution. Be prepared to give specific examples of this skill.
- Ability to speak and write clear English in order to create documentation as well as interact with end users.
- Sharp critical thinking skills, including systems and business analysis, problem analysis and resolution, and sound judgment/decision making ability.
- Proven ability to work in a rapid release product environment.
- Demonstrated trait of being a self-starter (this is VERY important!).
- Able to build trust within the development team by developing dependable good code.
- Know how to interact in a professional environment.
- Be able to contribute to technical discussions in a non-overbearing manner.
- Be able to see shades of grey instead of black or white when presented with an issue.
Knowledge and Skills
- Architectural, Engineering, design domain knowledge
- Microsoft Frameworks 2.0 & 3.5, C#, REST, XML, JSON, SQL Server 2005/2008
- Web technologies – HTML, CSS, Javascript (JQuery Framework)
- Current industry trends in development environments, tools, and software technology
- Processes relating to developing a released software product
- ObjectiveC and iPhone development experience a huge plus!
In order to be considered for this position, include:
- Compensation requirements- Availablity and starting date
- A detailed description of your last 2 projects
- At least 3 work related references
- Describe your contribution to the project as well as your role on the project
- Provide in your own words what you see as the difference between a coder/programmer and a software engineer
- By the way, we are looking for software engineers.