So www.fixyourstreet.ie launched on the 1st August to enable “we the people” report issues that we thought needed fixing, to our Local Authorities. It’s a great idea that’s been around for a while and has been looking for someone to champion it. That someone came along in the form of South Dublin County Council who stood up the service and are running it on a pilot basis for a while with a view to it, or somthing like it, being rolled out nationwide.
The technology behind FixYourStreet is an Open Source platform called Ushahidi – or “witness” and its got an interesting history which you can read at www.ushahidi.org. Now Esri has a bit of form with Ushahidi arising from our work around Disaster Response. I became interested in the possibility of using some of our open source tools to integrate with the South Dublin County Council Ushahidi server.
I contacted Tommy Kavanagh over at South Dublin who encouraged me to try out the Ushahidi REST API. Now this was just what I was looking for as ArcGIS also uses a REST API and its a no brainer as far as loose coupled system integration goes. It took me a while to find the documentation for the Ushahidi API, its here by the way. Once found it told me all I needed to know about sending REST queries to Ushahidi to return XML or JSON responses.
I then downloaded the Esri open source Public Information Map template from ArcGIS.com. Now the Public Information Map template includes a Ushahidi.js file to enable the Viewer render information from a Ushahidi server but it took me a while to figure out how to wire it up.
Ushahidi in the Public Information Viewer
After about an hour – success! I had a working Public Information Viewer including a feed of Incidents directly from South Dublin’s FixYourStreet Ushahidi server.
A simple integration but now we can go on to consider other uses of this information. Display and analysis with Social Media feeds from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr come to mind but also the desktop possibilities for hot spot mapping and time series analysis.
What is significant for me is that this is an example of an integration between two sets of software that are “Open”. One, Ushahidi, is classic Open Source and the other, the Public Information Map, is just open. But because they both use open standards like REST and XML they support easy integration. And because the people who are using the technology are committed to Open Data principles it was possible to for these two complimentary technologies to communicate effectively.
Kudos to South Dublin County Council and all involved.
