Highlights from National Day of Civic Hacking
Over the weekend, hundreds of volunteers gathered in spaces around the country to leverage their skills to build, share, and learn about government and technology. With more than 50 events happening around the country, it’s hard to distill the effort into one report — and so we’ve gathered some highlights below.
Impact
- Code for America Brigades and other organizations hosted 65 events in 53 cities. We had 250 people in Austin, 200 in Houston, 200 in New York and 100 in Miami!
- 18 Total Challenges — including 12 from federal agencies and two from the State of California. These were in addition to local initiatives that covered topics ranging from juvenile expungement to affordable housing.
- #hackforchange hashtag trended most of the weekend with 11,000 tweets from over 3,000 users. More than 600 watched this #HackforChange video from the White house.
- Four additional cities requested to become Code for America Brigade cities including New Orleans. This brings the number of volunteer civic tech groups in the United States to 80 cities.
A Few Favorite Moments
Code for Miami participant Jean-Claude Noel:
“Two months ago today, I became a free man after nearly a decade in Florida prisons,” said Noel. [This weekend], I hung out with the coolest young coders in Miami who thought my idea — making an easier transition for the 30,000 inmates who walk out of Florida’s prison gates and back into our communities — was worth spending a day nonstop coding. And so did Dr. DJ Patil, first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, who flew in from DC just to help us. Code for Miami, the citizens of Miami-Dade are in your debt.”
The winning event in Austin was an app that helped people expunge their criminal records:
Code for Charlotte Captain Jill Bjers
“The Opportunity Project is really important here because Charlotte was recently ranked 50th out of 50 in economic mobility. Charlotte is very much a tale of two cities. For some there is wealth, quick growth and lots of amenities. For others, poverty is inherited and breaking that cycle is difficult. We had a group run with the idea of what can help increase economic mobility and the dig into the datasets that have been released. We now have two new projects around the affordable housing finders laid on top of some transit analyst.”
US CTO Megan Smith visited National Day of Civic Hacking events in DC:
From Los Angeles Brigade Captain Vyki Englert:
“It’s definitely worth noting that this year’s event attracted people with a really diverse set of backgrounds — our reach expanded beyond strictly technical people, and I think we did a great job of inspiring attendees with ways to get involved that don’t require technical experience (user research, goal-oriented design thinking, testing, etc). I like to think of it as an important next step in expanding the civic hacking community.”
Not to be outdone, US Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil visited three events in three cities on what has to be the most epic #civictech road trip ever:
From Code for Boston Captain Harlan Weber:
“In Boston, ”Code for Boston partnered with MassIT, the state IT department, to put on a CityCamp event where technologists, citizens, and government workers came together to explore issues around housing, transportation, open data, and the environment.”
In New York, BetaNYC partnered with the NYC Park District to hold a “datajam.”
In Athens, a team developed http://athens-civic-book.herokuapp.com — a platform where Athenians can find their commissioner by address and they’re working with the commissioners to get them on the platform so they can create surveys to solicit feedback.
In Delaware, White House advisor Drew Zachary spoke with organizers about Barack Obama’s Promise Zone projects.
Inspired? Raise your hand.
If you were inspired by National Day of Civic Hacking and want to continue on your projects — here’s a few ways that you can stay involved!
- Volunteer with your local Brigade: Work with your neighbors to change your community from the inside out.
- Propose a session at the Code for America Summit: Did you do something awesome during National Day of Civic Hacking? Is your Brigade doing great things and you want to brag? Did y’all talk about a really interesting and compelling problem and want to have a larger conversation about it? Propose a session at the Code for America Summit!
- Apply to be a fellow: Serve your country by working with governments on projects that put technology to work for everyone. Application closes July 16th.
See you at the next hack night!
P.S. Checkout some of our favorite Tweets from the weekend!
