Bloomington, IN, USA

Web Page: http://bloomington.in.gov/documents/viewDocument.php?document_id=7522

Mailing List: mailto:dev@bloomington.in.gov

The City of Bloomington is a progressive community and a leader in the use and production of open source software to streamline city operations, reduce costs and provide high quality constituent services.  

We are particularly interested in projects that expand and improve our suite of Open311 tools. We are also interested in creative proposals that address the needs of cities and other municipal governments to better serve their citizens through open source software tools.

Check out our ideas page for some projects ideas!

Projects

• Feature Enhancement to the GeoReporter Android Open311 Client An Android client exists to serve as an Open311 constituent reporting tool but it lacks certain essential features. The aim of this project is to add some of these features like a Tablet Interface, General UI/UX improvements bringing it more in line with Holo Guidelines, Navigation fixes/enhancements, local side caching of data for offline viewing, searching for issues, richer reports and filtering of shown issues based on various factors like position, previously submitted issues etc.
• Implementing an SMS-based interaction module for uReport based on Open311 Standard Currently, citizens interact with uReport through either a web interface or through iPhone/Android app. I propose to build a SMS based front end for uReport. This module will have two parts. First would be the web-based app which would handle the incoming SMS responses and generate replies for them. Second would be the Configuration Panel, which will be part of Web Proxy.
• Mapping module on uReport - City of Bloomington The city of Bloomington has a web application uReport to receive the issues reported by citizens. Now the city's database stored more than 70,000 tickets. In the main page of the web application, the users need to see the tickets on the map. Also they can filter tickets by choosing properties as search parameters. However, a problem rose. If we show all the tickets as markers on the map at a time, the map will be full of markers. Also, displaying the markers will take a long time. What's worse, the client will receive tickets from Solr server. The time to transmit tickets data from server to client will also be too long to accept. We need to cluster markers on server side and transmit the clusters instead of tickets to the map of the client.
• New user interface and map-based browsing or GeoReporter for iPad GeoReporter could benefit a lot from an improved user interface, which offers a much better user experience. I have run usability tests for the current interface and come up with a new prototype. In the second part of the summer, depending whether the functionality for location-based queries will be added to the Open311 Server specifications, I will either develop a map-based browsing feature for GeoReporter, or an iPad interface. The map-based browsing would use a feature of the Open311 Server which we hope will be implemented as soon as possible, and which will allow to search reports based on the location (latitude and longitude). I would also use this new feature to show the user similar reports when he is creating a new one. GeoReporter for iPad will be the iPad version of the current app. I will focus mostly on creating the user interface, since most of the code can be reused. The choice between GeoReporter for iPad and map-based browsing will be made depending on the progress with the Open311 implementation and together with the mentors.