Where's my school bus
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Project Info

Users' URL
http://www.codeforamerica.org/apps/wheres-my-school-bus/
Developers' URL
https://github.com/codeforraleigh/wmsb
Stage
Commenting: Initial status for project, it's an idea people are commenting on
README

Where's My School Bus? is a location information app allowing parents to track their child’s bus in real time. Several Wake County parents are interested in exploring this project for the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS).

Project Activity
Log Buzz

Update #4

Some good activity on the page GitHub project over the last few weeks. No active development happened at the February 3 meet-up, so anyone who wants to contribute should look at the issues queue.

In between meet-ups, Jason Hibbets did have a kickoff call with Wake County Public School Systems communications office and was able to verify that the school buses do have a GPS service and there is a 5-year contract in place—the specific service is uncertain, but we will find out soon.

The WCPSS transportation team is excited to work with the Code for Raleigh brigade and explained that there would be some policy issues that would need to be taken care of before any type of deployment. We shouldn't need to worry about this, but should be aware that this will be a step in the process down the line.

Posted on by Jason Hibbets

Update #3

Great jump start to the Where's my school bus project tonight.

We had Jim Scarboroug­h, Jason Draper, Kheang Lim, John Skarbek, and myself huddled around a TV with Drapper at the helm coding, debugging, and finally making a fake school bus appear in Boston.

What we did tonight:

  • Downloaded the app and got it running locally to display a location.
  • Added several issues to GitHub queue, see: https://github.com/codeforraleigh/wmsb/issues

Next items to work on:

Must do: Need review of Drapper's pull request by another developer.

  • Configure where the map starts
  • Specify fake data in development
  • Fake login for test / Need real credentials
  • i18n

Open questions

  • Need to get real data / understand how the data will be delivered from WCPSS

Posted on by Jason Hibbets

Update #2

Jason Hibbets had a brief conference call with Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob from New Urban Mechanics (Boston) on Tuesday, December 9. Here are some notes from that conversation:

  • Where's my school bus authentication: Parents last name, student ID, student date of birth — little to no issues with security
  • The project was piloted with three groups for the beta: 1) a k-8 school, 2) special education committee, 3) Greater Boston school admins
  • GPS vendor is Zonar - http://www.zonarsystems.com/
  • The service is hosted in the cloud on heroku with an integration to the Zonar API
  • Routes - bus routes are not in the system, the app only shows the current location of the bus (via bus numbers—which causes issues sometime if buses are in the shop)

Next steps - trying to meet with Wake County Public School System communications director and other stakeholders from transportation

Posted on by Jason Hibbets

Update #1

During the December 2, 2014 brigade meet-up Jason Hibbets pitched the project idea to the group. After a meeting last with with Caroline Sullivan, Wake Wounty Board of Commissioners, we believe we have the political buy-in for citizens to help solve a pain-point like this for Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) parents.

Over the next month, we'd like to have a discussion about how this project could take shape and identify the potential concerns from parents and any technical challenges to implement.

In January, we will work on a more robust project plan and determine a path forward for 2015.

Posted on by Jason Hibbets