#ndoch

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]

Thank you to Art Crawford of Esri for these photos.

T-Rex (@downtowntrex) on Hackathon kickoff night

Jon Leek explaining how hackathons work

MasheryDev had a fantastic NDoCH at Seattle City Hall last Saturday (being run in association with Code for America and Code for Seattle). We want to extend special thanks to Seth Vincent, courageous organizer!

 Around 100 hackers, designers, local political figures, business leaders and non-profit sector workers showed up and put in a full, rewarding and exciting day building 12 different civic projects. 

Two Intel prizes were awarded: Best use of technology to analyze, measure, understand and improve metrics of Urban Vitality and the “Code for Good” award for the best use of open data or open hardware to address a recognized civic need.

The Urban metrics award was given to a team of hardware hackers, lead by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways's Bob Edmiston, who produced a system to measuring pedestrian and bicycle traffic to inform budget decision around Seattle Greenways. 

The Code for Good prize when to  a two-person team, consisting of Richard Barnes and Rebecca Fink, who used open data from air quality sensor networks to produce time-series visualizations so that anyone can rapidly assess air pollution in cities around them over time.

A tremendous amount of creativity and community spirit was present in the room and we look forward to next year's National Day of Civic Hacking!

Congratulate the winners yourselves on Twitter: @SNGreenWays, @finog.

Over 80 Kansas Citians came together June 1-2, 2013 for National Day of Civic Hacking at Hack KC in the Board Room at Union Station. Participants included software developers, city staff, designers, project managers, writers, neighborhood leaders and more!

Many participants were engaging in this type of event for the first time and had responses like “this is the first hack event I’ve been to and you’re awesome” and “these types of events are really awesome at finding people who are talented and dedicated.”

The local press was also excited by these new ideas emerging in Kansas City. Check out stories from 41ActionNews, Kansas City Star, and KMBZ.

Listed in order of presentation, here are the main nine projects worked on over the weekend:

Daily 311 Brief - Andrew Hyder 

The Kansas City 311 Daily Brief shows cases opened and closed yesterday using KCMO’s open 311 data.

Achieved in a weekend: Repurposed Boston’s Daily Brief app for KC and connected open data

KC Airport Community Engagement - Bill Mullins Proposal to see how to best invest money for the airport versus other infrastructure through user-centered evaluation of what’s civically important using stakeholder profiles such as urban seniors and airline staff.

Achieved in a weekend: Community discussions and presentation document

Re.Use.Full - Leslie Scott, Ai Namima, Kol Kheang, Alexis Petri, Melissa Melina, Jon Kohrs

Re.Use.Full helps match people looking to re-home their gently used household items with worthy nonprofit organizations who can put them to good use.

Achieved in a weekend: name, logo, launch site

Needs:  front end development, design, talk with non-profit orgs  and people who frequently donate household items to charity

Made in KC - Richard Shipley, Katie Greer

Made in KC is a digital listing for locally made products available online and as an Android app. A big need is a branding mark that can be put on products and utilized by businesses to show that they are locally made. With the individuality of the local brands in mind, the logo was developed in a way that the colors can be customized by each company.

Needs: help getting word out, meetings with local manufacturers and restaurants, fundraising

Garden Free - Caitlin McMurty, Louisa Whitfield-Smith, Camilo Snapp, Jarrett Homann, Zach Flanders, Jon Stephens

Garden Free is dedicated to improving urban food access by connecting those looking to grow healthy food with the land they need to do so. Need a place to garden? Enter your address and Garden Free will show you properties near you in Wyandotte County, color-coded for how easy it is to start a garden on the site.

Achieved in a weekend: integrating open data, launch site, criteria for land

Needs: designers, GIS coding for the different criteria

Votify - Andrew Douglass, Wesley McKain, Deborah Soetandio

In seeing that mayors in many American cities are elected by voter turnouts in single digit percentages, Votify seeks to connect voters with election information and notifications. After entering your address, Votify finds your voting precinct and sends you an email when you have an election coming up. Data is captured by a combinations of scraping data from election boards and election boards providing information directly. In the future it will add mobile integration and calendar invites with an appointment to vote.

Needs: Connections to voting advocacy groups

WikiKC Neighborhood Stories - Synthia Payne, Larry Arnold

WikiKC was furthered over the weekend by creating a place within in it for telling personal stories about neighborhoods. Stories were collected from many HackKC participants to get the collection started. The team found it was helpful to write down what others are saying, rather than just trying to write down your story.

Achieved in a weekend: new wiki pages, story collection

Needs: getting in all neighborhoods, more stories, easy way for anyone to add their story

Awesome Transit Apps- Kyle Rogler, Ryan Mott, Ron McLinden, Bradley Dice, Jestin Stoffel, Mack Yi

This team saw two big problems in Kansas City in that all of the bus systems are not combined in one map and they also do not give updates on bus arrivals. By working with KCATA via Twitter over the weekend, the team was able to use GTFS and OneBusAway to integrate it into a near real time map.

Achieved in a weekend: translated KCATA's GPS feed into GTFS-Realtime, applied it to the OneBusAway Visualizer

Needs: real time data, make it more fun through game mechanics, add all bus systems for the metro area, connections to transit agencies

Teardown Tattler - Jase Wilson, Briston Davidge, Paul Barham, David Snodgrass, Shawn Davison, Gatlin Hebert, Marlene Jeffers

Many of Kansas City's buildings have already been lost. Most could have been saved if people had gotten involved sooner. Teardown Tattler monitors the city’s 311 database for dangerous building notices, allows users to sign up to get an email notification of new notices as well as browse the site for map of current notices. The target user is any concerned citizen, but especially those who want to affect urban planning and already community organize around planning decisions.

Achieved in a weekend: built front end page, scrape 311 data, Google street view of the buildings, email notification

Needs: Add monitoring of demolition permits, but that’s often too late in the process to save a building so we'll architect a process to identify at risk buildings using water shutoff data and other key indicators of demolition. Add user-specified geographic areas for monitoring/notifications and saving multiple locations. Add Advocacy arm utilizing Neighborland API.

Civic Tech Expo

Some great organizations also came out to share how they’re making a better Kansas City. We had booths from Boys Grow, Urban Harvest KC, Kansas City Maker Faire, Connecting for Good, and a DIY touchtable running OpenPlans.

Want to do more?

If you love these projects and want to build more civic tech for Kansas City, join the Brigade!

Organizers

HackKC was organized by Jase Wilson of Neighbor.ly, Will Barkis from the Mozilla Foundation, Ariel Kennan and Andrew Hyder from Code for America, and Aaaron Deacon from KC Digital Drive.

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