Just a bit of a backstory: We wanted to make it easier to access local governments, and started off building an engagement tool to connect with local government officials on topics that matter most to us. As we iterated on it, we learnt from our own experiences, and those of people around us, that it was not easy to find government agencies and the services (anything from parking ticket to business licenses) they provide. We are starting with a couple of hundred cities and their online services and adding more every week. We will also be adding county/state and other gov agency services (you might find some already) so that there is a single place to find every government service.
Also as we built this, we realized that there is only a fraction of services you can get online and most of them need multiple trips to the offices. There is a huge wastage of resources in every agency building the same tools, and often requiring residents/businesses to create multiple accounts to access gov services. We intend to have a SSO to be able to access any gov service online.
Our aim is to make all local gov services accessible with a simple interface, as most often gov websites aren’t easy to navigate and are very agency focused. We are curious to hear your thoughts on how we can improve and make it more useful.
Openly | Web Developer | Paid Internship | San Mateo, California | Onsite
Openly is organizing world’s governance information. We’re building a search engine for local government services. Our goal is to put every put every public service on the planet online.
Our current stack is Django/Postgres/ES/React-Redux and we’re looking for someone who is familiar with React-Redux. You don’t need to be extremely proficient at Algo/DS questions, or React-Redux itself, as long as you are willing to learn. Definitely a plus if you know a bit of Django, and excited about owning the stack fully, as we grow.
For more information, contact me directly:
Krishna, ybv@weopenly.com
Thanks for the suggestion, i'll check it out right away.
It's a service that converts text or websites to audio. It's voices seem pretty good (I've just tested a couple, both with text in english and in spanish).
I love that it haves the ability to integrate the articles I send to Narro into a podcast feed, that I can suscribe to see in Overcast next to my "real" podcast.
After I realized the reasons behind Twitter's 140 character limit, I started to think if one can express anything within 140 chars. Its difficult, and for the same reason, people use services that let them tweet more than 140 chars (with a link to the service). I have also observed people trying to use SMS lingo to cram their words into 140 chars. I thought it would be nice to have a service that shortens your tweets.
The algorithm is based on the assumption that, as long as the crammed word sounds like the actual word, it is comprehensible. I have used Python's Fuzzy library to generate soundex codes of each of the words in a sentence, then, I removed vowels from the actual words till I get the shortest substring(?) of the actual word that shares the same soundex code with the actual word.
Right now, it handles URLs and mentions. Let me know what you guys think about it.
