Matt MacDonald - Latest Comments

Re: What if adding more money to our school budget doesn’t help our children as much as we hope?

Lynn — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:34:12 -0000

Another book worth reading above the one mentioned in your blog post is "The Underground History of American Education" you can actually read it for free here (written by a NYC teacher who after years of teaching and winning multiple awards left the profession in disgust):

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...

I think you are correct in the assumption that a 150 year old system, that was actually developed for the industrial revolution will not and cannot provide the "critical thinking" and individualized education that Parents want and expect out of Public Education today. The system has a foundation that worked back then, but does not work today. Drastic changes are needed and EVERYONE must realize that we each need to play our part in fixing it - first and foremost, in accepting that the system is broken (or outdated, however you want to view it) and must be re-built via a paradigm shift.

My question though is this - will such a Goliath of administration and bureaucracy ever allow that change to truly happen? History has shown that institutions of this magnitude will fight to the death to keep the status quo - when will the tipping point occur where that status quo is no longer acceptable to the general public??

Re: I support our teachers – I don’t support the Teacher Contract

Intriguied — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 08:50:34 -0000

Matt, I find your article intriguing and useful, but I think you have to take into consideration things that data cannot as well. School climate for a teacher in Watertown is very difficult. Young teachers, have young families, and large debt as teachers need to get a M.Ed. in their early years to obtain professional licensure from the state of MA. These young teachers have to go where they can earn money to pay for their student loans and their families. This is no different than someone seeking employment in the private sector. Most young teachers in the district have second jobs to help cover this, on top of their full time teaching jobs, and working summer school. So the argument that they have the summer's off doesn't work. Add to this the climate where many view you as in adequate at your job without even meeting you or watching your teaching; while people post such insults in papers and online... it doesn't make for a good working environment. Then worrying every year will you have a job, will you make enough money to pay for your bills? Yes many people in this country are facing the same issues. But at the same time many people in this country are not serving as a scapegoat for the towns of this nation, blaming greedy teachers- who are working well over 60 hours a week, so they can do the job they love, teach- while still making enough money to cover the bills. Teachers do not have the liberty like other town employees who negotiate contracts (police and fire) to make up for losses in contract funding with overtime and details. If they could, the town would certainly go broke. Most teachers in the district work well beyond their contract hours. The fact that many in this town are enraged by the teachers "work to contract" actions is puzzling? If anything it should make us examine how much teachers do outside of that contract. If it is so detrimental to their child's learning perhaps it should be part of the contract? Watertown teachers are going above and beyond every day and to be punished for the actions of the minority of teachers who are not as "talented" as their counterparts is just disrespectful. Administration should do their part and take responsibility for handling these situations, they are not without power or a part in that minority. In every aspect of the working community, for profit, non-profit, and public service this minority exists, and no this minority does not always lose their job. I would ask that you not only take a look at the data for teachers, but also the data for the town. I also ask that you take into consideration the people involved.

Re: Series: How to replace your city or town website and improve it for free

Jmckown — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:58:53 -0000

Good article.

A good CMS solution for a municipality goes well beyond a simple CMS feature list. Sure, there are countless open source solutions too. But the problem is that they aren't always the best solution just because they are free. Most web development shops that build sites using these solutions do not keep them updated and working as they should. What happens when they need features that are not included in a plugin that was used? What happens when there are vulnerabilities? Is the free CMS easy to use? Not always. There are benefits to both approaches for sure. Don't forget the hidden costs associated with a "free" solution. You mentioned CivicPlus, who we compete against routinely with our CivicLogic system. I think that both of us do a good job of supporting the end users of the websites much better than an IT guy that is already overburdened that works for a city. To make a new website decentralized, thus putting the employees in control of their website, will save a lot of money and make serving citizens easier I think.

As you point out, a hosted solution is less than the cost of an employee, and it comes with support as part of the hosting. Where CivicPlus is $600+ per month, we are only $150 for the same features. You won't find an employee that will work for $150 per month, that is for sure! :)

Re: Watertown Data Sources

neocMatt — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:55:50 -0000

Hi,

It isn't clear that I would be legally in the clear to use the data that SpotCrime as they are scraping that information from CrimeReports.com. By scraping the information SpotCrime is potentially in a legal grey area and I'd much rather see this information be unlocked without copyright restrictions from the source, the police and fire departments.

Thanks,
Matt

Re: Watertown Data Sources

Matt — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:16:08 -0000

Does SpotCrime have the same restrictions as CrimeReports? I didn't see anything specifically forbidding the use of that information. They have an RSS feed, that I am sure you can filter. Alternately, they already have a pretty good site - maybe just link to them for the moment.

Re: Series: How to replace your city or town website and improve it for free

Bob Savage — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:53:16 -0000

Matt, good article. I'm glad you are doing all of this. I think it is worth considering something, however. In my experience, before going to far with potential features, one should develop a formal definition of the various classes of users. In this case they might be:
1) Town Government Leaders (e.g. the Town Council, School Committee),
2) Town Employees (those beyond the Leaders who might still need to interact with the site for information, maybe people working in the DPW?)
3) Citizens (this obviously is the main focus of the website as it exists today, and this class of users could be further partitioned by the kinds of services they might be interested in).
4) Local Businesses (or those considering opening a business in Watertown).

The reason I place a priority on identifying classes of users is that one can't credibly think about functionality without thinking about the needs of the users. Further features are only mechanisms for providing the necessary functionality. A "feature" that doesn't provide functionality to a real user group is, at best, irrelevant.

Anyways, good work, and best of luck!

Re: Mapping the location of building permit submissions in Watertown, MA

D Brooks — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:16:11 -0000

good stuff Matt. I searched the town website seeing if our GC actually submitted a permit for the work done on our condo earlier in 2011 and see that a permit was indeed issued.

Other nice to haves would be...

- on the Socrata search tool once there is more data, have the ability to search and filter by date range
- any ability to introduce a click-through service to click on an address and get dumped right into Zillow's website? Its nice to get the address placement then be able to see the details of that address.

Dave

Re: He Said, She Said – Extracting data from 5 years of Watertown Town Council meetings

Jill Connolly — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 06:10:14 -0000

This looks like it was a ton of work but the result is clear and concise information in an easy-to-read format. Thanks for creating this tool!

Re: API access questions for Tyler Technologies creator of MUNIS

kinlane — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 15:22:51 -0000

Hey Matt...have you had any response from TylerTech on this? Seems like a company targeting government services should have an API strategy / response ready to go. Especially with a tag line like, "Technology with a Purpose, Integration with Ease".

I'd like to work on story for blog.programmableweb.com, can you email at kinlane@gmail.com?

Re: Mapping the location of building permit submissions in Watertown, MA

neocMatt — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:56:06 -0000

Thanks, hopefully I get around to actually automating these parts but if not maybe someone else in Watertown can help out.

Thanks for the pointer/reminder to try pdftotext. I tried it out this morning and it definitely was able to convert the document to text but one feature that I really dig with the DeskUNPDF is that it will output the table it finds as a CSV. Looking at the output that pdftotext generated it wouldn't be a ton of work to take the text output and create a more structured format.

If anything I hope that by showing the town building inspector how this information can be made more useful and consumable by the public it might encourage him to find a better data format for sharing.

Thanks,
Matt

Re: Mapping the location of building permit submissions in Watertown, MA

onyxfish — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:49:02 -0000

Matt, I love this recipe, because its such a common hack when dealing with civic datasets.

One suggestion for the automation: I'm not sure what sort of CLI interface DeskUNPDF offers, but for a more a portable solution you might try pdftotext from the xpdf toolkit. We've had particularly good luck with the "-layout" flag for documents with embedded tables (though its always worth trying "-raw" and without any flags). It might streamline the automation process.