NDoCH with Open Oakland and OakDOT
We just got the survey results back from National Day of Civic Hacking (NDoCH) in Oakland this year. While you can’t please all of the people all of the time, overall the response was positive. It was an honor to co-facilitate the day with Elina, an Open Oakland regular, while teammates from Open Oakland and the City of Oakland looked after important details like food, subject matter expertise, and making sure the space was set up.
In the weeks before, we didn’t get the time to plan that we would have liked, but the volunteer-planned and -led event came together well. Neil had registration and breakfast set up before folks arrived, so we could get off to a great start. Tom, who is a current Code for America fellow as well as Open Oakland regular, gave a quick overview of his work with crime victims. After a few more intros, we got right into dot voting on what folks wanted to talk about with an Oakland Department of Transportation planner, Nicole, in the room.
Transportation access, community trust, and communication were all at the top of most attendees’ minds, so we asked people to dig a little deeper and tell us what that meant to them. We divided them into groups of three, and they took turns talking about how transportation and infrastructure impact their daily lives. They talked about how they hear about transportation projects now, how they wished they could hear about transportation projects, and how they would like to give feedback on projects.
We had groups come up and tell us the main points they heard, whether that was something that resonated with all three folks in their group, or just something that felt important or impactful in one person’s experience.
Themes that came out were:
Finding out about projects too late
Feeling like feedback doesn’t matter
The need for a better website with more centralized information — people were anti-apps!
Aggregate data and make it easy to understand
Make communication more straightforward
Put it all on one map
We handed out big pieces of paper, and over lunch participants sketched out potential solutions. They drew everything from technologies for cyclists to new web tools for people to see project status.
Mai-Ling Garcia, the City’s Online Engagement Manager, and OakDOT will be using the input from this session to inform a redesign of OakDOT’s part of the city website, since that was something that a lot of attendees mentioned was important to them. Through their conversations, we learned what types of content and formats people would expect to see. This is just the start of implementing more human-centered design work at the City, and I’m excited to see what they do next.
If you’d like to work on projects focused on government, technology and design, come on down to Open Oakland. They meet every Tuesday in downtown Oakland. Find out more: https://www.openoakland.org/.
NDoCH is coordinated by Code for America. You can see all the Brigades that participated this year here: https://www.codeforamerica.org/events/national-day-of-civic-hacking-2017.
Learn more about CfA and our work here: https://www.codeforamerica.org/.
