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Streetlights are at the front lines of the smart city. They offer a public place to hang cameras, sensors, wireless antennas and more. They also provide new revenue streams by renting out space for technology or lowering energy costs through LED conversions. But how do policy makers decide how to use this newly valuable asset, and how do residents weigh in on the process? We want to make information about how are streetlights are used more transparent and accessible.

stakeholder The people of Kansas City whose data has the potential to be collected. The City of Kansas City and it’s open data initiative

problem_statement Data on streetlights right now are spread out depending on who owns the infrastructure. As aforementioned, a lot of street light infrastructure has changed and will continue to change hands in order to deploy smart infrastructure as quickly as technology demands. This has the potential to mean that a public good and public piece of infrastructure has the ability to collect data on people in it’s vicinity is not owned by a public entity. Currently, many poles in the Kansas City metro area are still be owned by municipalities, but in the near future that might not be true, and to anticipate that change and prepare for it by creating an open database is key to this project.

minimum_viable_solution To create an aggregated database of street lights in the kansas city metro area, where a person might be able to find if a specific street light is smart, has the ability to collect data, has changed to LED or not, among other things.

additional_opportunity There is additional opportunity to add whatever data is actually being collected as the database grows. Adding an API that could update data collected in real time.

updates to the projects

1. Contacted Lee's Summit (found data)
2. Contacted KCMO (found data)
3. Contacted Overland Park (no data yet)
4. Contacted Gladstone (no data yet)
5. Contacted KCP & L (waiting on response from higher-ups)
6. Finished project canvas
7. acquired Noah on the team
8. acquired Vanessa on the team
9. Put KCMO and Lee's Summit data into arcGIS separately
10. Cleaned Lee's Summit location data to match KCMO
11. discussed plan for map / API hosting

future issues

1. Find out types of lighting
2. combine the two datasets so that they are consistent.
3. create python program to scrape the data from CSV and put it into the program Noah created from the Google Maps API
4. Continue to reach out to other cities for their information