Gord1i

@Gord1i@fosstodon.org

Civil Servant, Data Engineer and well known raconteur.

searchable by tootfinder!

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Gord1i, to datascience

City of #CapeTown #DataScience is (still) looking for a frontend dev! Our work is in service of millions of residents of the Best City in the World*, and you can be part of that!

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gordoninggs_ctcareers-opentowork-vacancy-activity-7153631827927171073-xRlz?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android

#CivicTech #fedihired

Feel free to reach out with any questions - either by replying to this post, or via email using <my first name>.<my surname>@capetown.gov.za

  • Sheer cheek on my part

Please boost

robinlovelace, (edited ) to random
@robinlovelace@fosstodon.org avatar

My first ever map for the #30DayMapChallenge: location data of 141k road traffic fatalities in Great Britain, 1979-2022. Spot the coordinate reference issues! Belated day 1: points. #geocompx

Gord1i,

@robinlovelace Maybe just a bad time for shopping the North Sea? ;)

danie10, to southafrica
@danie10@mastodon.social avatar

Impressed that there is a Bot now auto-posting City of alerts that were normally only on X. Wonder if it is active for other municipalities in - good to see more of these types of services appearing in the Fediverse.

See https://mastodon.social/deck/@coct_service_alerts

Gord1i,

@danie10 @robertlogger Pleased you like the bot!

It's more of a tech demo for some formerly internal data that we're exposing via a public API - all this data is accessible via a variety of JSON files behind a CDN - https://gist.github.com/Gordonei/947ff2ae93b8a7983594244053724161

The step we're busy with is standardising some of the fields further. Once that's done, I will probably write a proper #OpenAI spec for it

Gord1i,

@danie10 @robertlogger I'm waiting to the new year to pitch our social media manager on our own, City of #CapeTown instance. I suspect the low volumes will result in reluctance, but that also means low risk.

There is a reasonable chance that the federation is the future of social tech, so it's worth experimenting, I think..

Gord1i, to opensource

Happened to play with @firefox's screenshotting tool for the first time, and it's pretty amazing, for one reason, and one reason only - HTML element awareness

#OpenSource

Gord1i,

@s3rvant @firefox do you know if there is similar functionality on the mobile browser? Android screen recording is so clunky...

Gord1i, to random

Going to finalise my talk for #DataConf (Cape Town) this weekend - what are some things you wish data people understood about org culture? Particularly non-technical &/ public sector orgs

#CivicTech

Gord1i,

@danie10 Ah, ja, I understand the frustration - for me, the real nadir was during the pandemic, where the best data available was a crowd sourced effort (credit to @vukosi and his research group), usually by reading gov official social media posts. A lot of government clearly just doesn't get it.

This being said, we're trying to do things differently at the City of #CapeTown. This talk will actually be about the experience of building a public, real time APIs - https://www.dataconf.co.za/agenda.html

Gord1i,

@danie10 But check out @coct_loadshedding_alerts and @coct_service_alerts to some demos of bots using some of that public data!

Gord1i,

@danie10 Ja, #OpenUp have done excellent work there, as well as with Vulekamali, National Treasury's more general portal (https://vulekamali.gov.za/) - JD did a great talk on building it at last year's PyConZA - https://www.youtube.com/live/JSfg-H5XIHI?si=Ms0LELiPa0vfgwbu

#OpenCitiesLabs have also done some good stuff, particularly with narrative content on the Durban Edge portal - https://edge.durban/

These are all for dissemination though - I would like to push the envelope, along the line of O'Reilly's gov-as-a-platform idea.

Gord1i,

@danie10 There are definitely people in SITA doing their best, but to be honest, my experience has been that the SA government generally follows a very conservative, blue-chip enterprise approach to digital tech (it's generally still called IT, which is a sign, if nothing else is).

I have been extremely underwhelmed by these Enterprise IT offerings - there is a reason more modern tech companies, using mostly open source have wiped them out

brianokken, to random
@brianokken@fosstodon.org avatar

Are people still using slack?
This isn’t facetious. I want to have place to allow people to ask and answer questions for the upcoming pytest course. I’m wondering if slack is fine or if there is a better choice.

Gord1i,

@brianokken We moved our unofficial work Slack to Discord because of the message history limit about 2 years ago, and haven't looked back.

Has Slack got syntax highlighting for code blocks yet? It's a feature of Discord that has caused me much delight

Gord1i, to llm

Having a little fun with some of our public SNS topics over the weekend, building some bots:

https://botsin.space/

https://botsin.space/

#capetown #LLM #civictech

The Service Alerts one is using ChatGPT to draft the content, based off JSON, some reader beware

Source Code: https://github.com/cityofcapetown/mastodon-bots

Gord1i,

Hat tip to @Edent for his excellent Mastodon bot tutorial: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/08/easy-guide-to-building-mastodon-bots/

And of course, @muffinista for providing the instance!

Gord1i, to random

A cool #GIS / #spatial data resource for Africa - https://explorer.digitalearth.africa/products/s1_rtc

The fine folks over at Digital Earth have produced Radiometric, Terrain Corrected SAR imagery off of @esa's Sentinel 1 constellation. Roughly equivalent to the sentinel 2 l2a imagery, but RADAR (which has interesting reflective properties)!

danie10, to languagelearning
@danie10@mastodon.social avatar

Cape Town libraries have free access to Overdrive or Libby eBooks as well as over 7,000 local and international newspapers via PressReader

Apart from the above there is also online access to African storybooks in English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans, Fundza literacy learning, SA curriculum for homeschooling, ISET publication for careers in IT, and more.

It is really good to see libraries catering ...continues

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/cape-town-libraries-have-free-access-to-overdrive-or-libby-ebooks-as-well-as-over-7000-local-and-international-newspapers-via-pressreader/

Gord1i,

@danie10 what's also great is that there is a decent Libby Electron app, with a snap, too - https://snapcraft.io/libbylinux

Works great on my Surface tablet running Ubuntu

Gord1i,

@danie10 Must admit I'm not a fan of snaps, but they have gotten better in recent versions (of Ubuntu, at least). And the security benefit does help one sleep easier at night.

It's an Electron app though, so should be fairly portable, if you can track down the source...

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • provamag3
  • InstantRegret
  • mdbf
  • ethstaker
  • magazineikmin
  • GTA5RPClips
  • rosin
  • thenastyranch
  • Youngstown
  • osvaldo12
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • JUstTest
  • Durango
  • everett
  • cisconetworking
  • Leos
  • normalnudes
  • cubers
  • modclub
  • ngwrru68w68
  • tacticalgear
  • megavids
  • anitta
  • tester
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •