Milano@Work: A new ‘Hackathoned’ Service for Milano
As a Featured Story from the Open4Citizens project, the team in Milano shares some of their successful post-hack achievements:
The rationale of the first hackathon cycle of the Milano pilot was related to the citizens growing need for transparency on urban transformations. These were turned into three challenges, being the outcome of the repeated interactions between the Politecnico di Milano’s “policy entrepreneurs” and some of the most active citizen groups. These were also used to feed the hackathon event:
• avvisaMI (“I want to be warned!”) — or, how can the timeliness and completeness of the information disseminated by the Municipality and the companies in charge to the residents in the areas affected by the public works be improved by an appropriate use of open data?
• cantieri che disastro! (“What a messy construction site!”) — or, how can the citizens living nearby be reassured and better informed/documented about the (low level of) impact of the existing construction sites on urban environment (air pollution, noise, etc.) as well as on the same people’s lifestyles (cycling lanes, green areas, traffic diversions etc.)?
• parliamo di Milano (“Let’s speak about Milan!”) — or, how can the quality and effectiveness of civic participation in decision making on urban transformations be improved thanks to the use of open data and the development of new applications?
The O4C coding marathon took place on December 17–18, 2016. The event was organized at the premises of Politecnico di Milano and endorsed by the City Alderman for participation and Open Data. Advertising started about 15 days earlier on Eventbrite with tickets made available for three different categories of participants: 1) creative designers, ICT developers, communication professionals; 2) public officials, and 3) ordinary citizens.
At the end of the two days, 5 mock-ups and 6 prototypes have been presented in a pitch mode to a real large public: several citizens who had worked in the pre-hack, reached the event for the final presentation. Two prizes were awarded by a jury composed of IT experts, managers and policy makers from the Municipality of Milan, and 1 representative of Politecnico.
The best mock-up, CantieriMIei, is a web/mobile application supporting citizens in the process of claiming for the compensation payments allocated by the Municipality to the residents in the areas most affected by the construction sites.
The best prototype, MilanoFocus, is a web application mapping urban impacts of construction sites.
As of January 2017, the winning team for the app is working in cooperation with the competent municipal office to turn the prototyped solution into one of the online services supplied by the Municipality inside the municipal geo-portal. This integration reduced the coding work to be done by the team that agreed to complete an app for mobiles, i.e. something more than what they had planned during the Hackathon event.
The post hack work related to the winning prototyped solution is undergoing the following steps:
- Integration of the solution inside the Municipal Service platform
- Dedicated use for the M4 construction sites
- Test planned with citizens
Overall the Milano based Open4Citizens team is very excited and inspired about great possibilities and collaboration opportunities! Looking ahead they are already busy planning the next open data based Hackathon for Autumn 2017!
A more in-depth (Italian) story of the Hackathon: https://medium.com/@ilariavitellio/apprendere-dallesperienza-suggerimenti-per-un-hackathon-d0ca8ed7969e
More information about Open4Citizens in Milano — and the project overall: https://www.facebook.com/opendatalabMilano & /http://open4citizens.eu/pilots/milano/
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