#CodeAcrossNYC

[betanyc]

#CodeAcrossNYC 2014 wrap up

BetaNYC's 1st class photo by Daniel Wilson. 

What an amazing weekend! On friday, TechPresident wrote about digital engagement starting to be the new normal in NY City Council and City Hall. Just one day later, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Council member Ben Kallos, Council member Mark Levine, five representatives from Community Boards, NYC DoITT, and NYC 311 joined one hundred of NYC's civic hacker community to make NYC's open data useful.

#CodeAcrossNYC 2014 was a two day prototype-athon taking NYC’s open government data and making it useful for NY City Council, their staff, and NYC’s Community Boards. In partnership with the Manhattan Borough President’s office, several City Council members and Community Boards, now is the time to make NYC's open data useful for all. This was our second #CodeAcrossNYC.

Our desired outcomes for Code Across NYC 2014 were:

Create tools that help city council members and community boards understand the City’s open data.

Prototype tools and dashboards for NY City Council and their staff.

Prototype tools and dashboards for NYC Community Boards.

Expose NYC’s civic hacker community to City Council Members, Council Staff, Community Board Members, and NYPD Precinct Community Councils.

With this in mind, about 20 projects were created, and these were the 12 projects that were judged.

2Gather: Transportation Help shape your scheduling and meeting needs as well as other's using active MTA/NYCOpen Data. Get to your meetings and activities on time, relieve transport capacity issues, meet people safely on time.

Choose-A-High-School NYC: Every year 80,000 middle-school students and their families choose a high school to attend. This is an application to help students find schools based on their life and experience goals, public transportation commute time, and school curriculum offerings.

City Visualization: The community board can use the map to understand and create disaster resiliency plans. And strategize about community resources.

Emrals: 

With City budgets getting pinched, municipalities have fewer resources to respond to concerns quickly. Emrals.com makes it possible for people to use their smartphones to address issues such as trash and icy sidewalks quickly and easily. With our site, you can report a problem, verify a problem or fix a problem. For instance, your elderly neighbor is afraid to leave the building due to the ice and snow covering the sidewalk.

You report the problem to Emrals using your smart phone and take a picture of the sidewalk. Your location is automatically entered via GIS. Other people can then verify that the reported issue does exist. A verifier or another good citizen can then fix the problem, showing work and results using their smart phone, and earn Emrals, a civic cryptocurrency, for helping the community.

Emrals makes it easy to be Good for the Hood.

noisyNYC: When decided where to move to in NYC I thought it would be great to visualize which areas in NYC have the most noise complaints. The project has evolved to visualizing all sorts of data from the 311 data set along with the ability to accept user data.

NYC Parks N Rec: We are building a web app that helps people find parks and facilities in NYC. The goal is to promote health and wellness in the community and encourage exploration of recreational activities and the outdoors

Post to 311 NYC (a.k.a. P.2.311 NYC): P.2.311 NYC is a bootleg, completely unsupported open311 API layer built on top of the existing NYC 311 complaint form. This API makes it easy to embed context-relevant NYC 311 complaint forms on your own web site or in mobile apps. May also include a very crude true "real-time" stream of requests or the ability to add metadata like pics/audio/video to requests.

Property Tax Explorer Map: A web map to explore property data (amount paid, property value, tax rate) across NYC.

Relief Insight Marketplace Info: We are a group of volunteers interested in promoting disaster resilience. Our project tonight is to communicate and design our open disaster resilience marketplace. We are an open data source.

Tammany: Tammany is a constituent services management tool for organizations, elected officials, community boards and agencies. Our tool allows caseworkers to easily handle cases through the issue life cycle by creating a case form, tracking progress, and sending automatic updates to constituents. Our tool enables collaboration within offices—a newsfeed allows caseworkers to update progress and notes. Tammany generates issue analytics allowing government offices to identify trends and plan progressively.

Trends: Community Board Email App: This tool will inform New York City Community Boards and residents about local issues. Boards will have new access to information that will enable them to set agenda based on data. Board members and residents will receive an e-mail summary and snapshots of local recent 311 complaints.

VoxyVote: Power up your civics journey! Take quizzes, watch videos & play games to earn points, badges, bragging rights & more! 

For our first time, we handed out six awards. In a novel attempt of 360° community engagement, attendants voted for their favorite projects. In general, voting went well and swiftly AND we had one tie.

Best Overall Civic App - Property Tax Explorer & Tammany

Best User Experience - Choose a High School NYC

Most Creative Use of Open Data - NYC Parks N Rec

Best Citizen Engagement App - Emrals

Best Visualization of NYC Open Data - City Visualizations

Best City Council/Community Board App - Trends: Community Board Email App

Thank you event sponsors:

Ontodia / Pediacities 

Vizalytics

NYU Incubator, Varick St. 

Smoretgage

Code for America / Esri & Microsoft

Socrata

For the next month, we're going to focus on project development as we develop a series of BetaTalks and full scale membership program. Please join us on Meetup.com for our upcoming hacknights and our first #CivicFridays.

Lastly, #CodeAcrossNYC 2014 wouldn't have been possible without the generous nature of an amazing group of volunteers: Jessica, Terrance, Aileen, Ariel, Chris, Doneliza, Joe, Daniel, Freddie, Gunnar, Joel, Mikael, Nathan, Yasi, Charlene, Kat, Sekai, Theodore, Alex, Tricia, Paul, Jennifer, Patrick, Sean, Emily, Trae, Vietnhi, Sami, Aykut, Daniel, Ren, Takisha.

A special thanks goes out to Jessica, Terrance, and Joel for keeping everything in order, and managing the volunteer framework. THANK YOU

[betanyc]

#CodeAcross NYC 2015 Recap!

Thank you for three days of awesome! This year’s CodeAcross NYC was the largest and most diverse to date. Thank you for making these three days wonderful.

For those of you who couldn’t attend all of it, here is how you can catchup!

Watch archived livestreamed videos via the Internet Society of New York.

Check out new projects on projects.beta.nyc

Share your photos and videos on talk.beta.nyc or to flickr.

YOU WERE AWESOME!!

For those of you who couldn’t stay to the every end, here is what we accomplished!

180 joined us at Microsoft to kick off CodeAcross with Dr. Mashriki, NYC’s Chief Analytics Officer! 

For our hackathon and unconference at CivicHall, 225 joined us for Saturday and 135 joined us on Sunday. That's 2,970 hours worth of hacking, education, and collaboration!!

For those two days, YOU hosted 37 one-hour long unconference sessions on the past, present, and future of civic tech, open data, and open government.

16 of you took a SIX hour long workshop on how to use NYC’s 311 data, CartoDB, Socrata, and Census Reporter

NYC’s Community Data portal now has 62 datasets!!

During the hackathon

Ten projects were added to BetaNYC’s projects page. Three were functional web apps and three set up a process to create new datasets.

At the end, we threw an awesome pizza party AND the community honored the following projects!

Athena Civic Insights was certified awesome with the following honors: the Best of Show, Best Data Visualization, and Best 21 & Under team. (Working Code - GitHub)

Mapping Unplanned MTA Service Alerts was certified awesome with the following honors: Best User Experience and Best Map Hack. (GitHub)

Am I Rent Stabilized was certified awesome with the following honors: Won Most Creative Use of Data. (Working Code - GitHub)

City Record Online Workgroup was certified awesome with the following honors: Best Scraper Team (GitHub - Workgroup)

Honorable mention goes to the following projects who worked their asses off.

NYC Rent Stabilization Unit Counts (GitHub)

App for Bustime  (GitHub)

CityGram.NYC (Working Code - GitHub)

Homeward (GitHub)

Honda Civic Apps (GitHub)

NYPD Data Comparisons (GitHub)

Thank you

CodeAcross NYC 2015 wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Council Member Ben Kallos, Ben Wellington, Terrance Becket, Lauren Rennee, Noel Hidalgo, Nathan Storey, Hayley Richardson, Ben Arancibia, Lucio Tolentino, Volkan Unsal, Joel Natividad, the Ontodia team, the Civic Hall staff, the Microsoft Civic Tech NYC team, Marc Shifflett, Madhu, Emily Tsai, Aidan Feldman, Josselin Phillipe, Emily Goldman, Eran Livne, Doneliza Joaquin, Taylor Kuhn, Max Galka, Nancy Chien, James O'Toole, and Rich Prescott!!! Thank you for making magic happen!

Thanks to Red Hat and Socrata for sending staff. Thanks to CartoDB and Twilio for discount codes! Thank you to our community partners who helped us expand our outreach and impact! The Mayor's Office of Data Analytics (MODA) is New York City's civic intelligence center, allowing the City to aggregate and analyze data from across City agencies, to more effectively address crime, public safety, and quality of life issues. The office uses analytics tools to prioritize risk more strategically, deliver services more efficiently, enforce laws more effectively and increase transparency. Microsoft Tech & Civic Engagement - We collaboratively addresses the most pressing community challenges through the creation, deployment, and evangelism of civic technology. Accela provides civic engagement solutions for government. Accela’s solutions uniquely address the diverse needs of their constituents by making publicly available information more accessible. The Accela Civic Platform includes solutions for land management, asset management, licensing and case management, legislative management, right of way management, citizen relationship management, recreation and resource management, environmental health and safety. Code for America’s Brigade program is an international network of people committed to using their voices and hands, in collaboration with local governments, to make their cities better. Civic Hall is New York City’s new home for the civic innovation movement. We use technology, open data, and networks to make our communities, cities, and government work more effectively. New York Tech Meetup is the largest meetup group in the world and a non-profit organization representing professionals from all parts of the New York technology community. NYTM builds programs and partnerships to support the growth and diversification of the city’s technology industry. Silicon Harlem was formed to galvanize upper Manhattan companies and residents to embrace our model to Transform Harlem into a Technology and innovation Hub that thrives in the digital economy. Light and Eye Photography Full service photography for weddings, design firms, development shops, ad agencies, non-profit organizations, and individuals. ISOC-NY is the Greater New York Metropolitan Area chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC). We are a 501(c)3 non-profit. The mission of (ISOC-NY) is: 1. in support of ISOC, to assure the beneficial, open evolution of the global Internet, 2. to promote local initiatives, maximize the societal benefits which the Internet can bring to the New York area, and 3. to advance the professional development of ISOC members in the New York area.