
How Chicago Got Smart About Sensors - okfine
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-chicago-got-smart-about-sensors-207b6429870c
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wyldfire
> The recent award of $3 million in NSF funding — announced at a White House
> summit last week — will cover the engineering and software development
> needed to deploy 500 of these devices throughout Chicago ...

When NSF grants this kind of money, do they mandate that the recipient provide
the source material (code, schematics, etc) under a liberal license (or public
domain)? Seems like it would be a big benefit for cities everywhere to
leverage the technology and not just the concept.

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JadeNB
I'm not sure about their policies on software development, but they, and other
granting bodies (I think NHS was an early pioneer), are increasingly moving
towards requiring easy access to the product of publicly funded work:
[http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access](http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access)
.

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dfinlay
This is a very exciting project, and it opens the door for quite a bit of
analysis and hopefully better city planning/services.

For a few years I worked for a company based in Chicago, and had to travel
there often. I would stay a particular hotel on Kinzie St. I learned quickly
that you never wanted a room on the second or third floor, especially facing
the alley. Almost every night, 5 or 6 separate trash companies' garbage trucks
would ramble down the alley to empty one or two dumpsters. These were
acoustically, vibrationally, visually and atmospherically noxious events. It
wouldn't have been as bad if it was one truck, but the temporally spaced
parade made for fitful sleep. Hopefully this project will bubble issues like
this to the surface.

