Civic Innovations

Lots of work is being done to finalize the next version of the Open311 API spec (officially referred to as GeoReport V2).

Almost a year ago I launched TweetMy311 – a service that lets people report non-emergency service requests using a smart phone and Twitter. Since then, a lot has changed – not only with the Open311 specification but with the tools available to build powerful Twitter-based applications.

In the last several months, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about and working with Node.js. Some of the things I did in the initial version of TweetMy311 (written in PHP) are so much easier to do in Node.js that I’ve decided to completely rewrite the application to use Node. In addition, since I initially launched TweetMy311 CouchDB (the NoSQL database on which the app is built) has also seen a lot of enhancements.

I’ve expecting the overhaul I’m currently working on to make the application code a lot more efficient and easy to understand. Once this overhaul is complete, I intend to release a big chunk of it as open source software, so that anyone that wants to build a powerful Node.js/CouchDB-based civic app can do so.

It’s also exciting to see new cities get on board the Open311 bandwagon. The City of Boston is now supporting Open311 and has started to issue API keys to developers.

As part of my work to overhaul TweetMy311, I’ve developed a neat little Node.js library for interacting with the Open311 API. Since I just started to work with the Boston implementation, I thought it would be helpful to others interested in doing so to walk through a quick example.

If you want to run this example for yourself, you’ll need to have Node.js installed, specifically the latest version – v0.4.2. If you have the Node Package Manager installed, you can simply do:

npm install open311

Once you’ve done this, you should be able to run the following script:

Which will output:

This is just a quick example of how to make the most basic of API calls with the Node.js Open311 module. You can use this module to build fully feature Open311 applications.

I’ll be doing some more blogging in the weeks ahead as the rewrite of TweetMy311 continues, and work on this phase of the GeoReport V2 spec is concluded.

Stay tuned!