Civic Hacking for Interactive Cities
Hacking is just any amateur innovation on an existing system, and it is a deeply democratic activity. It’s about critical thinking. It’s about questioning existing ways of doing things. It’s the idea that if you see a problem, you work to fix it, and not just complain about it and in many ways, hacking is what built America. Betsy Ross was a hacker. The Underground Railroad was a brilliant hack. And from the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs, hacking has always been at the foundation of American democracy.
Hackers exist and not all of them are out to destroy you!! Catherine Bracy, director of community organizing at Code for America talks about hackers and their impact on society. She talks about a new term ‘Civic Hacking’. Civic hacking is a creative and often technological approach to solving civic problems. Often civic hacking involves the use of government data to make governments more accountable, but the goals of civic hacking are as diverse as those who might call themselves hackers. Civic hackers can be programmers, designers, data scientists, good communicators, civic organizers, entrepreneurs, government employees and anyone willing to get his or her hands dirty solving problems.
Cities wants public sector innovation, they want new ideas that create value for society. They want new solutions that improve the city operations, solutions which involve technology, solutions that are designed with people. Hacking is one of the ways cities are getting their new ideas. A new phenomenon of open data, hackathons, write-a-thons, call for innovations has begun globally. Citizens, students are ready to participate in these initiatives, they are contributing to this new type of e-governance. This is leading to a new responsive and interactive type of government and the city officials are loving this new concept because it is helping them to get more work done with less government resources being used.
Catherine in her talk, mentions some examples of such successful civic hacking initiatives in Honolulu, Oakland and Mexico City. There are other examples of new civic hacking communities from academia, new academic centers like New York University- Center for Urban Science+Progress(NYU-CUSP) is one of them. Catherine gives examples of some famous hackers like Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs. There are some other modern hackers like Andrew Townsend, Bloomberg with his famous hacks like 311. People working in private agencies like Sidewalk labs, students in academic centers like NYU-CUSP are all ‘good hackers’ and ‘good citizens’ as per Catherine.
