Courtbot in Tulsa
(and hopefully soon EVERYWHERE!)
How to Make an
Amazing Slide Deck
Carlos Moreno, Code for Tulsa
@chimchim237
What is Courtbot?
txt message reminders of upcoming court dates.
Why?
Tulsa issues ~50,000 municipal citations per year; Failure to Show for city and county court dates, and Bench Warrants for failure to pay fines and fees is a huge issue in Tulsa County.
40,000 people in Atlanta missed their court date.
Research by Human Right Watch (John Raphling) shows that text reminders work!
Kudos.
HUGE thanks to 2014 CfA Atlanta Fellowship & Code for Anchorage!
What is Courtbot?
client subscribes by texting their case #
courtbot searches their case in a database and sends new updates.
What is Courtbot?
messages are sent via twilio
in Tulsa, court cases are managed via a statewide website (OSCN).
What is Courtbot?
We wrote an API to the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network website (OSCN) to scrape their data for new cases.
Courtbot uses a cron job (heroku: scheduler) to search the data for matches:
new court dates (a.k.a. new “descriptions” as part of the case) are sent via text to subscribers
Courtbot in your city
Deployment to another city. �
Non-software: find a champion in your city. We are working with Tulsa County Courthouse Clerk & the Tulsa County public defender’s office.
Deployment to another city.
Need:
Deployment to another city. �
Two issues to resolve: 1)time zone. 2)sourcing the data.
Courtbot’s Structure.
Postgres Database Connection�https://github.com/codefortulsa/courtbot-engine-pg
Collecting the reminders to send�https://github.com/codefortulsa/courtbot-engine
Sending messages via Twilio�https://github.com/codefortulsa/courtbot-engine-twilio
Tying it all together�https://github.com/codefortulsa/courtbot
Courtbot’s Structure.
Data endpoint; collected data in the way that Courtbot needs it.
Collecting reminders
Sending Reminders
Courtbot-engine-pg
Courtbot-engine
courtbot-engine-twilio
Data Source
Other repos we’ve started
Collecting data specifically from the OSCN database
https://github.com/codefortulsa/courtbot-engine-data-oscn
Sending messages via Facebook messenger instead of twilio
https://github.com/codefortulsa/courtbot-engine-facebook
User-interface to add courtbot subscribers via web instead of text message
https://github.com/codefortulsa/courtbook
How you can help
Problem �
In https://github.com/codefortulsa/courtbot/blob/master/web.js the timezone is hard-coded—see line 100 (not sure if this appears anywhere else… it might?)�
So if we want to deploy to the coasts, we need to make this part of the install and config process, not written in like this.
Problem �Here are the fields of data that Courtbot needs.
- name
- date
- description
- case_number
where the, "description" is the message that you are sending that person.
the date can be in either one of two formats.
{ date: "2017-01-01T09:30", description: "first event" },
// or
{ date: "Thursday, December 29, 2016 at 9:00 AM", description: "second event" }
Problem �
...and as of right now, there’s no neat easy way to source that data and present it to courtbot (without each fork solving its own data source issue and then writing its own component to feed the data to courtbot).
BUT!! We have to start with baby steps. So let’s write a few, and then we can standardize and scale it.
Bringing back fines/fees �
In Tulsa, we’ve been asked by the city to bring back the fine/fee payment option functionality that the Atlanta project had.
We’d love some help with this! It’d be great to make this available not just for Tulsa, but configurable for any city.
Questions?�Ideas to make Courtbot better?�Let’s talk!
�@chimchim237�Slack: chimchim�