Park It DC

I guess it’s better late than never to post about the application that I created for “Apps for Democracy.”  Apps for Democracy was a innovation contest in DC that was put on by the DC Government and iStrategyLabs.  The goal was to save money and open  geographic information that the Gov’t had to the public to see what kinds of technology innovations they could come up with.  At the end of a month long contest $20,000 in cash prizes would be awarded to the best innovations.  You can hear a radio interview about the contest at Federal News Radio.

So I decided to enter the contest and see what I could come up with.  There was a bunch of feeds to choose from and I was pretty sure that everyone one was going to do something with crime since that feed was the most readily available.  After reviewing all the available feeds I decided that the biggest problem I had with DC was trying to find a place to park that wouldn’t cost me money and didn’t require a permit. This leads me to my application which would be to take all the parking meter data and data about parking in Washington, DC and plot it on a map and spit out real time information about a specific parking locations.  The web application as then called “Park It DC.”

You can find more about the application at www.parkitdc.com.  The application is fully open source and currently is an active project.  If you want to join the project just head over to http://code.google.com/p/parkitdc/ or email us at join@parkitdc.com so that we can add you to the developers list.

So what does the future hold for Park It DC?  Fist off I am hoping to get more developers to help with bugs and features!  Secondly there are some problems with the site that need to be fixed before we push out new feature requests.  The contest was a month long so I had to get something out quick.  Therefore, it was not commented well if at all, and some of the code is pretty sloppy.  We will fix all of this in the coming weeks.  Next, are some new feature requests that I would like to get out.  Here is a list of requests that I am currently working on.

1. iPhone and Blacberry application.  Why not be able to get this information when you are in an area?  This is probably one of the most requested features.  If you can help please let me know! I currently don’t have a Apple Developer license.
2. Add More Parking Garages.  Currently I just do a screen scrape on Colonial Parking Inc. and PMI’s websites to grab parking locations in DC.  Am going to try to work with these and other parking companies throughout DC to get them to feed me data about parking lots including pricing and hours or operation.
3. Charts.  A couple have asked for charts and statistics about crime, broken meters and % of spots that are free Vs. pay.  People like charts so I think this would be a good addition.  Right now the vision is to use Google Charts.
4. Update parking meter data.  This should be coming in 2009 for DC GIS department.

If you have any requests you would like to see you can log them in our project area at http://code.google.com/p/parkitdc/ or develop them yourself and submit into the repository.

So that’s the vision for the Park It DC.  If you haven’t seen the app then stop over to www.parkitdc.com and check it out.  We even have a widget that you can put on your iGoogle page!

The Park It DC application took silver at the “Apps for Democracy” contest.  You can see a full list of winners here.