#codeformiami

What do you get when some of South Florida's best and brightest are brought together and asked to "hack" for change? Well, if you were lucky enough to take part at one of the 106 locations across the United States hosting local National Day of Civic Hacking events, you just might have witnessed history.

[photo via @LienT)

Designed to spur collaboration in communities using technology, open data, and the support of volunteers and government agencies alike, these (sometimes multi-day) hackathons ask anyone in the community to team up, contribute their skills, and learn something new about the places they live. The following is a brief recap of my local NDoCH experience at The LAB Miami. 

On Saturday morning, Code for Miami's Rebekah Monson, along with the City Manager of Miami Daniel J. Alfonso and Florida's Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, announced to the hackers, designers, and techies that filled the LAB Miami's main room the importance of our day ahead. "Imagine if we could turn loose upon the people of Florida an understanding of how this all works," referencing the $80 billion dollar budget and the complexity of navigating government agencies and services. "What if they had access to that information, and understood it, and could create value for them, in their work." He also reflected on Florida's history of transparency reporting, "We've made a lot of data available, and we've gone from a D, to a A-, to an A, but what if people could actually use the data," which led to cheers in the audience. Closing his remarks, he insisted our actions are taking Florida "in a whole new path."

CFO@JeffAtwater kicks off #hackforchange w @CodeForMiami @CodeforFTL @CodeForOrlando @CodeForTampaBay @codeforamerica pic.twitter.com/yzYOltDNYt

— Ashley Carr (@FloridAshley)

June 6, 2015

The day resulted in websites, mobile apps, visualizations, and hardware hacks to address five different challenge areas: Disaster Preparedness and Relief, Climate Change, Transportation, Open Data (Working Group), and for a very first in Florida's history, Vendor Payment Data from the last six years was made available for download (Special thanks to Jeff Atwater, C.F.O and his team).

Below are the pictures of the groups presenting their projects, many made in less than five hours, with many first time hackathon participants included. This was a vital step in recognizing the state-wide development of civic hacking brigades and to support those working towards better data access, usability, and transparency in their community. I was honored to take part and look forward to the projects, happy hacking Floridians! If you want to relive the opening remarks, they can be found here [starts at 1:05:49].

[View the story "#HackForChange hits Florida - NDoCH, Code for Miami" on Storify]

"We try to integrate technology with being a good Miamian. Code for Miami assembles volunteer developers, designers, and citizens for regular meetups. We work with counties and non profits to build amazing things.

One of our most recent projects was TextMyBusMIA. It's a text messaging wrapper that we've built around Miami Dade transit data. Folks that don’t have an Android or iPhone can actually text with a bus stop ID to receive information of when the next bus is coming.

We're trying to help build the Miami developer eco system while motivating each other to be good citizens."

- -  Ernie Hsiung

Ernie Hsiung and Rebekah Monson launched Code for Miami, a local civic hacking brigade affiliated with Code for America. Ernie is a San Francisco native and has worked in Silicon Valley for approximately 9 years at various firms including Yahoo! and Ning. He relocated to Miami approximately 3 years ago and has made great strides to helping advance Miami developers.

Every week we manage to get some bright and caring individuals together to work and brainstorm projects to help our community. This meeting, marking the end of the first quarter shows we done a lot of work but there is still so much we can do.

RepMiami is currently in testing stages to see if there are any bugs. But for the most part is complete. Great work, Miguel!

We are currently waiting for some backside development from the county for the Open 311 application. In the meantime, Greg Bloom is currently working on an Open 211 initiative with openreferral.org. This is to direct people to non-government businesses for any services they may require. They are working with Switchboard Miami, Miami's current 211 provider, on how to best make this data open and searchable.

There has been a lot of local and media interest for the bicycle tracking app, 'Dude, Where's My Bike.' We're hoping to get this further into development in the coming weeks.

We had a visit this week from Jase Wilson, brigade captain of Code for Kansas City. Also with us was Rob Davis, brigade captain of Code for Ft. Lauderdale. It's always great to get together and discuss how throughout the country our Code for America brigades are working towards open government.

Heyyyy! @luminopolis is here from #codeforkc tonight! @codeforamerica ❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/LBz8aWmBVz

— Code For Miami (@CodeForMiami) April 1, 2014

Rob is currently working on the Florida Legislation Tracker which will work towards tracking and identifying the latest bills and legislation passed by Florida Lawmakers. Once it is completed, it will help citizens understand and track legislation with issues they find important.

Remember the next two weeks are going to be a little different than our usual meetings. Monday, April 7 our own Adrian Cardenas will present "Learning the Command Line," a beginners talk for folks that want to understand more about the interfaces behind Unix/Unix-like systems and command line utilities. April 14th we will be user testing the text my bus app. There will be two separate testing groups at Dadeland South Station and Government Center Metro Rail Station.

This week was a great meeting and it looks like we are getting close to the finishing steps on some of our great projects. We had a full house tonight which was absolutely wonderful. Here is the news on some of our key projects and where we currently stand.

The Local Business Data Tax Set has been organized thanks to Juan and Emily. Mike Sarsati from Miami Dade County has shown the progress to the City of Miami business tax collector and they were rather impressed by the amount of work in such a short amount of time! Hopefully now they will understand the benefit to making information open! ;D

The new goal with this project is to create a visual map to locate paid vs unpaid taxes by zip code. Let us know if this is something you want to work on!

For Open311, apparently our work was so exceptional, that the code for the main Open311 app is going to be updated to be a little more future-proof for any information that may be submitted later. So while there may be some initial downtime for those improvements, it's great to know that we are moving forward.

TextMyBus testing is going to be on April 14 during our meeting. 2 groups will meet at Government Center and Dadeland South Station and test the sticker design that has been created. Ben Manley has also made a premilnary promotional video for the TextMyBus app. You can download it on this thread. 

We are currently working on creating content for MiamiWiki. Maggie has drafted a stock letter to send to different local interest groups reaching out about local wiki and how they can contribute. Jeremy Roth stopped by with an idea of making a GPS-based Walking App of Miami that will pull information from MiamiWiki to educate locals and tourists of the geographical area they are in. We are currently looking to add historical content about Miami. As well, feel free to add information about your favorite places and what gives Miami it's flavor. Anyone can add to it!

by @robdotd

It isn’t very often that you get the opportunity to brainstorm about the future. You may daydream here and there about it, but do you ever really consider the potential?  How would things be different? What are the steps for us to get there?  And more importantly, who will be involved in creating it?

These were the types of questions posed at the Code for Miami’s Open Data Jam held last Saturday. An afternoon accompanied by group discussions and sticky-note adventures to help us reflect on something very important, the betterment of our community. This event was part of a much larger effort, an international CodeAcross day to unite people of all backgrounds and skillsets to engage each other in the hope of a better future. How do things get better you ask? Information is part of the answer, and our access to it as well as potential uses not currently being explored made the few hours shared together seem like just minutes.

Yenesco “Nesco” Cobain, an FIU student and one of the other attendees in the breakout group on Land Use and Real Estate had much to add. “What if someone could be alerted if they were entering a dangerous area?” he stated. Tourists could certainly use such a service, and that goes for many other areas outside of Miami as well. Another attendee suggested a heatmap of housing information emailed regularly to show new changes and trends, a useful idea for potential buyers or agents on the hunt. Permitting requirements and the need for contractor “ratings” were also brought up, a practical tool for that could be used vetting qualified and responsible builders.

Ideas blended, borrowing bits and pieces from each other, and grew into unique and actionable items. It was a humbling experience to see citizens (once called “strangers”) largely from different parts of South Florida come together for a common good. We live in these places together, shouldn’t we talk about our experiences too? Although my one regret is that I couldn’t be in two places at once, as I certainly would have enjoyed hearing the other breakout group’s suggestions. Public transportation, campaign finance, transparency in local elections, our wonderful parks, improved walkability, and the need for more “open hearts” made that afternoon time well spent. If you want to contribute to the conversation, join us on Monday night, 7pm at The Lab Miami. Everyone is welcome.