The future of dog owners interactions with one another, and the future of their interactions with WCC information.
Growler utilises Wellington City Councils data on parks and dog allowances within those parks. By using the power of modern design and map APIs Growler displays this information in a forward thinking more accessible format. We know with this we are able to improve compliance of dog owners to council restrictions and also improve dog owners experiences using council parks.
By bringing it to this geographical format we have been able to overlay this with a smart modern interface and bring a layer of social media to the project. Owners can now check their dog in and out of parks, review parks, and they can also befriend dogs they like and also flag dogs they do not.
So how does this help?
- Dogs often have unique personalities and unique needs. Imagine you have a very skittish dog. Would you not wish to be informed as to whether someones more overly aggressive dog was going to be at the park you were planning to go to? The same can be said the other way. Some dogs need to be kept away from other dogs as they have behavioural issues. The benefits of checking in and out of parks would allow for a safer more fulfilling experience for the owner and their dog.
- By befriending dogs you will receive notifications when they are in a park in your area. knowing there is another dog there for yours to play with makes exercising your dog that much easier.
- If you and your dog have had run ins with another dog previously you are able to flag that dog. This means you will be notified via the application if you try to take your dog to a park where this other dog may currently be.
- Parks are reviewed in order to give you a better basis to judge whether the park would suit the needs of your dog.
Our application will also track interactions users have with the application. This data can then inform WCC on how they could, better allocate the resources they have for these parks, engage with dogs that are showing signs of behavioural issues and get them the intervention they need, better understand dog owners in the Wellington region, as well as a myriad of other insights that come with collecting this kind of data.
In the future we see our application integrating with other datasets relating to dogs and their owners that are not currently available to us. Imagine if you could pay for, and check, your registration through this application. Imagine If you needed an all hours vet and the nearest was one click away. Imagine forming meet ups with like minded dog owners easily through this application.
Categories:
Data Transparency Award:
By taking this flat database and transforming it into this format we have made this data more transparent but more importantly more understandable. This information is for the everyday citizen and therefore needs a more intuitive interface.
The Future Tech Experience:
Although geospatial mapping and social media aren't the most rapidly evolving areas of the hackerverse anymore, their full potential has yet to be utilised within the government data space. We take these two burgeoning areas of tech and overlay them in order to give a better interface and also show a future ,where datasets like these, are brought out into the public realm using existing and emerging technologies in innovative ways.
The other forward thinking aspect we bring is the use of an API to track and contain all of our data. We plan on tracking the individual interactions people have with the parks, i.e. check-ins, dogs that are flagged multiple times as problems, park use and frequency of use. This allows a futuristic data tracking method for WCC. With this data they can then provide better services, such as maintenance at more popular parks, animal welfare and training help for overly aggressive dogs, the ability to check dogs that are unregistered but still using council parks and then follow up on getting those dogs registered. This use of data tracking in order to provide better service to citizens is undeniably the future of council and government interaction with the everyday people of New Zealand.
Thank you for looking at our project, we hope you enjoyed using and reading about it as much as we did making it.
Invision prototype
https://invis.io/6TCT69J2W#/246168107_Logopage
Front end source
https://github.com/TheCatTree/growler
API source
https://github.com/TheCatTree/growlerapi
