Video: Heat Seek Brings New York in From the Cold
Alinute Silzeviciute/Shutterstock.com
A civic hacking initiative uses open data for good.
New York City gets roughly 200,000 heating complaints every year.
"That has major impact on people's lives and on people's health," said William Jeffries, an engineer for Heat Seek, a civic hacking project turned nonprofit, which aims to help NYC citizens keep their heat on.
The team has built temperature sensors and distributed them to people's homes. Readings are taken every hour and transmitted to Heat Seek's remote servers, which analyze the data.
"That's the beauty of open data," said Tom Hunter, marketer for Heat Seek. "If you have the technology skills and you have the inquisitiveness and the curiosity, the data is there. It really just has to be combed through and figured out."
To find out more about Heat Seek, check out the video from Socrata's Open Data TV below:
(Image via Alinute Silzeviciute/ Shutterstock.com)