The Tenderloin tech lab has seen that while a lot of people in the Mid-Market area do not have access to computers, they do have relatively affordable access to mobile phones.
The platform has two goals:
- Provide a city-wide consolidated database for storing and updating information about public services. Currently this information is very difficult to find and keep up-to-date.
- Provide a mobile site that allows individuals to access and search for this information easily.
For example, if I'm a woman with two children and need temporary housing, I would want to be able to find the nearest women/children-only shelter that's open right now.
This is part of our Community Benefit Agreement with the city. Steven told Tiffany we would shoot to get a first version done by end of April.
From Steven:
On the surface, this seems like a straightforward database design exercise with a query interface, right? In the back of my mind, I think there's larger benefits here in understanding interest patterns in the demographic of the Mid-Market. What could you do as a city leader if you knew in real-time:
- What resources people are searching for
- Where they are searching from
- What they ended up choosing
This will replace http://ttlsf.herokuapp.com/ which uses a Google spreadsheet for persistence.
We're going to have three main components: database/query api, frontend, and admin ui.
####JS workflow
We want to write JS like civilized folk.
Setup:
npm install
npm install -g grunt-cli
Development:
There is a Gruntfile that describe the available tasks.
grunt watch
Watches app/**/*.js and runs jshint and a browserify task. The output is a js/static/output.js file which is included in index.html.
You can also just run grunt to verify JS and generate the static/output.js file.
####a changelog of sorts
- Added load_fixtures.html and got some decently normalized data into parse.
- Added a scaffold cloudcode app
- Added
FacilityandServiceBackbone models