This project has been created for the Opendata Hackaton 2021 by Felix Reiniger, Lukas Buchli, Fabio Zahner, Remo Steiner, Jurek Müller under the lead of Stefan Keller.
Project Description by Stefan F. Keller
The goal of the mobile/web application is to formulate and rate citizen suggestions on how to improve public and (semi-)private urban open spaces throughout Switzerland in terms of the city climate and general living conditions. The initial idea was focused on suggestions concerning urban heat including infrastructure such as shade structures (tents), trees, water points and green facades. However, the concept of suggestions to improve the neigborhood can easily and intuitivly be expanded to include suggestions about social and ecological topics in general.
The application is map based, where users can add suggestions, represented by different icons, to a specific location and be able to see and participate in active suggestions in their neighborhood. A mockup has been created and can be seen in the header slides.
The application has the goal to facilitate active discussion between the users around the presented ideas and to enable direct action to be taken.
For that purpose, users can rate suggestions and comment critically or constructively. Users can decide to support a certain suggestions, which means they will actively collaborate and work for that suggestion to be further developed and implemented. A chat function between supporters could facilitate the organization and would be the first point of contact for new supporters.
One crucial part of implementing a suggestion is to convince the owners of the respective land (private or public) or at least get their permission. However ownership is often opaque, which is why we strive to integrate features that allow the users to quickly identify the owners of the respective piece of land and contact them. This is a non trivial problem due to data availability and concerns of data privacy. Our approach at the moment is to work with the API of the Swiss Katasteramt. However there information is only available about the responsible land register offices which mostly only give ownership information after personal request. Contact information could be provided to supporters or a contact form could potentially be implemented.
This application is similar to "Züri wie neu" (mySociety's popular map-based reporting platform), but includes proposals in/for urban spaces. It must be) privacy preserving and is (will be) implemented based on open source software and open data, in particular OpenStreetMap data as well as Open Government Data from the City of Zurich and SwissTopo.
For more info about the challenge visit https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/CoolUrbanSpaces For more info about data and services on OpenStreetMap (OSM) see https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/OSM
GitHub Repository for Backend Code: https://github.com/lbuchli/cool_urban_spaces_backend
Final Project Presentation: Google Slides