Innovation chief taps IFTTT platform to spur ‘citizen scientists’- Valutrics

Simrall, who oversees the city’s IT department, chose the real-time air-quality data set for a couple of reasons: Air quality has a broad impact on the community, as it affects every resident and not just a couple of neighborhoods. Plus, the data set already had an established API — code that makes it easy for applications to interact.

Indeed, Simrall’s first step to make city data more accessible was to audit the open data sets and identify those with established APIs. The audit enabled Simrall and her team to prioritize what data sets needed APIs next, and it armed them with information on what data sets could be plugged into platforms like IFTTT right now.

The IFTTT-Louisville partnership

Louisville is considered an IFTTT partner. The city pays an annual fee to connect city data to other services, such as Google, Twitter or Facebook. The city makes these connections by constructing applets, mini-applications that act as a triggering mechanism between city data and a disparate service. A simple example is this: If the air quality changes, then send me a text message. Citizens can subscribe to the applets for free.

“We wanted to look at how we could integrate [open data] into commercial off-the-shelf solutions,” she said.

IFTTT was a natural fit with this strategy, because its basic construction for creating simple, conditional commands — what IFTTT used to call “recipes” — is “meant for APIs,” Simrall said. “It’s meant to say, if this happens, whatever it is, then, basically, call this other API to do this function.”

Simrall is hoping that by experimenting with platforms such as IFTTT, the city will not only better engage with average citizens, but spur what she refers to as “citizen scientists,” a low-code approach to app development, into action. Residents can, for example, build their own air-quality applet, if they’re so inclined. “A connection has to be made on the back end to the IFTTT platform,” she said. “We have to do that; the citizens can’t do that themselves. But once that connection exists, then they can build an applet or recipe.”

In fact, she’s already seeing this kind of “bidirectional community engagement” pay off. “We’ve already had citizen scientists do things like integrate the mayor’s daily news briefing into Amazon Echo so that citizens can ask for it,” she said.