mattgolsen

Absolutely. In a similar place after 20 years of various roles in technology. So I built a lumber mill, a woodshop and I'm going to start making things. Much more fulfilling.

I've had a similar experience, but by turning the cameras inwards, on my 8 acre property. I use surveillance to track animal patterns, keep an eye on my chickens, and get notice when someone arrives on the property. I've resisted pointing anything outside of the property, because frankly I don't care.

Another great use case is using BirdnetPi with all of my RTSP streams to identify all of the birds in the area. Ah...middle age.

We have a few more coming up in the next couple of months, you should come on out!

Open Data is actually one of the other projects that I'm on, and I'm sorry that you haven't had much success with it. We do have Waze data that we're currently working on making available, but there are some agreements in place that we have to honor before releasing it. That being said, there are a few methods you could utilize to get this data. HERE has a few different APIs around traffic, and if you sniff around some of the Waze project repos on GitHub, you can find the data sources for your area.

We did not do this with Socrates, we actually built this on our own, and are in the process of open sourcing the API for other people to take advantage of. We're planning on connecting it to our Open Data portal, which is based on DKAN, which will open up all sorts of new data sources.

Additionally, this is also a method for exploring Smart home to smart city integration. "If air quality is bad, turn on my filtration system" is an easy win. Roll that in with all sorts of other environmental or situational data that we have, and you can really flesh out a city that is responsive to the citizen.

Oh absolutely! This is a first step, sort of an experiment to see how citizens use this platform. We chose IFTTT because it wouldn't tie us to any specific ecosystem (Alexa, Google Assistant etc), but would allow us flexibility in terms of service delivery.

That being said, our next steps are to include things like content, public safety announcements and the like. What I'm personally really excited about though is using this with Open Data. Pushing things like restaurant data, crime, neighborhood development, or road closures.

Alot of these won't be very exciting in the get go, as we get an idea of usability and reliability. But think about checking for SNAP/WIC benefit eligibility through a multitude of interfaces, and then automatically connecting to a local grocery (or e-grocer like Amazon Fresh), then having it delivered to your door. That impacts real change, while respecting citizen data rights (at least from the government).

Government has a huge amount of incredibly valuable data, that just needs a contextual lens for citizens. We just needed a good method to start this sort of work.

I'm actually with the Digital Services team, at Louisville Metro Government.

My team and I actually built this. If anyone has any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them to the best of my ability.