#hackforchange

[lettersfromaaron-blog]

Apparently today is national #hackforchange day...hack your life - start receiving handwritten letters again. You'll be surprised at the positive side effects of receiving handwritten letters can have in your life. Link in bio 😊 (at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)

[onsumocom]

Slashdot: Today is Code for America's 'National Day of Civic Hacking'

Today is Code for America's 'National Day of Civic Hacking' Published on September 21, 2019 at 07:34AM "The biggest day of the year for civic technologists, the National Day of Civic Hacking, is Saturday, Sept. 21, and, as such, affiliated groups across the country are preparing their events," reports Government Technology: The National Day of Civic Hacking, simply put, is a day in which civic technologists and others interested in serving their communities come together in the service of tech projects aimed at doing just that. This is the seventh year for the event, which is organized in large part by the national nonpartisan and nonprofit civic tech group Code for America (CfA). This year, CfA has once again convened its many member brigades in the service of the National Day of Civic Hacking... To help facilitate projects, CfA&'s brigade network has identified three potential starting points for participants. The first is mapping out the record clearance project from the user's perspective. With many jurisdictions doing things like decriminalizing marijuana, there have become new opportunities for record clearance. The idea here is to be centered on the user's experience seeking conviction relief from government agencies. Next, the brigade network suggests developing a services usability scorecard for evaluating the accessibility of the expungement process and policies in states. Finally, they also recommend creating a user-friendly know your rights website, complete with digital resources for those who have criminal convictions on their records. If you're in the U.S. this web page offers to find a local event near you. (I attended my local event in 2013.) GeekWire notes this year one event will even be held at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond. Related news and updates on social media will be using the hashtag #HackForChange

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[joycebettencourt]

From Twitter: #FREE #DC #EVENT: #PublicGoodAppHouse Festival 11/13 - 11/15. RSVP: http://bit.ly/2yFD7bX #OpenGovData #civictech #hackforchange #dctech http://pic.twitter.com/kB0jYDl6oU— Caravan Studios (@caravanstudios) October 21, 2017

http://twitter.com/caravanstudios

[20500tv]

President Barack Obama - Why We, The People, Need to #HackForChange from Matt Scott on Vimeo.

[kevincurry]

[masherydev]

Hack for LA: Hackathon at LA City Hall

The two day Hack for LA hackathon took place last weekend at LA City Hall. This event was in association with the National Day of Civic Hacking, an Intel supported initiative to improve our communities and the government that serve them.  

The TechLA Technology and Innovation Conference occurred alongside the hackathon with discussion tracks on big data, green vehicles, and civic engagement.  

I represented both Mashery and Intel, sponsoring two challenges: 1) Best App Using the Mashery API Network with a prize of Rover 2.0 App Controlled Wireless Spy Tanks and 2) Best App Using the Intel XDK mobile app development platform, which yielded a prize of some beautiful Intel-powered Android tablets. Both Mashery and Intel proved a winning combination achieving four winning app awards (out of the 500 participants) using Mashery powered APIs and the Intel XDK, including the Hack for LA 1st place $3,000 grand prize and “will.i.am's" (of The Black Eyed Peas) "i.am.angel Foundation" $2,000 cash prize.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti kicked off the events Saturday morning.  His passionate and motivating speech about LA technology resonated through the LA Council Chamber.

Los Angeles Chief Innovation Technology Officer, Peter Marx gave an accompanying motivating speech and participated in Hack for LA.  I met with Peter just before his talk and was pleasantly surprised about his knowledge of Mashery and the API ecosystem. He proudly sported the HTML5 logo lapel pin on his suit jacket (see image below). That's my city's CIO.

Soon after the speeches, the conference continued and hackathon participants were directed to the hackathon on the 10th floor.  After the pre-hack pitches, hackers explored the floor seeking their workspace in the designated rooms.  One room was reserved for Hack for LA Kids, a hackathon crafted especially for the youth hacking crowd.

I met so many talented developers with an eagerness to learn. I provided a technical talk on the Mashery API Network and new Mashery tools including the “API Catalyst”, code snippets for simple and quick app deployment that incorporate APIs, built by our own Amit Jotwani.  In no time, developers were using the USA TODAY API with Intel XDK to create new apps!

I saw so many familiar faces including fellow developers, hackathon organizers, and community leaders all participating in the Hack for LA fun.  I presented a workshop “How to Build a Mobile App with the Mashery API Network” and called on a volunteer to help demonstrate this technology to the attendees with my direction.

In just minutes, our volunteer and participants built their very first Mashery-powered API app using Intel XDK in just minutes.  Many approached me afterwards expressing a willingness to build more apps after learning how much development time they saved learned from my workshop.

Final app presentations were held at Los Angeles Police Department Auditorium. The Mashery prize was awarded to “eDeliver.IT,” the convenient, cost saving delivery services app which used the Best Buy Products API.  

The Intel prize was awarded to "Know Thy Law," an app built with Intel XDK allowing users to post and vote on interesting LA laws, facts, and data pulled from Data.LACity.org.

The 1st place overall winner, "Shelter Connect" connecting shelters with restaurants and volunteer organizations was built by a team of high schoolers using the TomTom API.

"Help the Homeless” which used Intel XDK won the “i.am.angel Foundation” prize. The app pools information for those in need of free food, clothing, shelter, rehabilitation centers and other much needed services all around the Los Angeles County.  This app was inspired by the creator's own homeless experience and the tools he used to overcome his struggles.

Special thanks goes out to Lilly Kam of the "i.am.angel Foundation” and Catherine Geanuracos of the New Economy Campaigns for organizing Hack for LA and supporting local developers.

In addition, I want to thank the volunteers for their help to participants including meal preparations and audio/video setup.  Lastly, I want to thank the participating LA developer community for their commitment to technology and innovation. Let’s continue to make awesome apps!

[codeforbtv]

Photos from the first day of National Day of Civic Hacking in Burlington, Vermont

[cfakc-blog]

Hack Kansas City at National Day of Civic Hacking

Over 80 Kansas Citians came together June 1-2, 2013 for National Day of Civic Hacking at Hack KC in the Board Room at Union Station. Participants included software developers, city staff, designers, project managers, writers, neighborhood leaders and more!

Many participants were engaging in this type of event for the first time and had responses like “this is the first hack event I’ve been to and you’re awesome” and “these types of events are really awesome at finding people who are talented and dedicated.”

The local press was also excited by these new ideas emerging in Kansas City. Check out stories from 41ActionNews, Kansas City Star, and KMBZ.

Listed in order of presentation, here are the main nine projects worked on over the weekend:

Daily 311 Brief - Andrew Hyder 

The Kansas City 311 Daily Brief shows cases opened and closed yesterday using KCMO’s open 311 data.

Achieved in a weekend: Repurposed Boston’s Daily Brief app for KC and connected open data

KC Airport Community Engagement - Bill Mullins Proposal to see how to best invest money for the airport versus other infrastructure through user-centered evaluation of what’s civically important using stakeholder profiles such as urban seniors and airline staff.

Achieved in a weekend: Community discussions and presentation document

Re.Use.Full - Leslie Scott, Ai Namima, Kol Kheang, Alexis Petri, Melissa Melina, Jon Kohrs

Re.Use.Full helps match people looking to re-home their gently used household items with worthy nonprofit organizations who can put them to good use.

Achieved in a weekend: name, logo, launch site

Needs:  front end development, design, talk with non-profit orgs  and people who frequently donate household items to charity

Made in KC - Richard Shipley, Katie Greer

Made in KC is a digital listing for locally made products available online and as an Android app. A big need is a branding mark that can be put on products and utilized by businesses to show that they are locally made. With the individuality of the local brands in mind, the logo was developed in a way that the colors can be customized by each company.

Needs: help getting word out, meetings with local manufacturers and restaurants, fundraising

Garden Free - Caitlin McMurty, Louisa Whitfield-Smith, Camilo Snapp, Jarrett Homann, Zach Flanders, Jon Stephens

Garden Free is dedicated to improving urban food access by connecting those looking to grow healthy food with the land they need to do so. Need a place to garden? Enter your address and Garden Free will show you properties near you in Wyandotte County, color-coded for how easy it is to start a garden on the site.

Achieved in a weekend: integrating open data, launch site, criteria for land

Needs: designers, GIS coding for the different criteria

Votify - Andrew Douglass, Wesley McKain, Deborah Soetandio

In seeing that mayors in many American cities are elected by voter turnouts in single digit percentages, Votify seeks to connect voters with election information and notifications. After entering your address, Votify finds your voting precinct and sends you an email when you have an election coming up. Data is captured by a combinations of scraping data from election boards and election boards providing information directly. In the future it will add mobile integration and calendar invites with an appointment to vote.

Needs: Connections to voting advocacy groups

WikiKC Neighborhood Stories - Synthia Payne, Larry Arnold

WikiKC was furthered over the weekend by creating a place within in it for telling personal stories about neighborhoods. Stories were collected from many HackKC participants to get the collection started. The team found it was helpful to write down what others are saying, rather than just trying to write down your story.

Achieved in a weekend: new wiki pages, story collection

Needs: getting in all neighborhoods, more stories, easy way for anyone to add their story

Awesome Transit Apps- Kyle Rogler, Ryan Mott, Ron McLinden, Bradley Dice, Jestin Stoffel, Mack Yi

This team saw two big problems in Kansas City in that all of the bus systems are not combined in one map and they also do not give updates on bus arrivals. By working with KCATA via Twitter over the weekend, the team was able to use GTFS and OneBusAway to integrate it into a near real time map.

Achieved in a weekend: translated KCATA's GPS feed into GTFS-Realtime, applied it to the OneBusAway Visualizer

Needs: real time data, make it more fun through game mechanics, add all bus systems for the metro area, connections to transit agencies

Teardown Tattler - Jase Wilson, Briston Davidge, Paul Barham, David Snodgrass, Shawn Davison, Gatlin Hebert, Marlene Jeffers

Many of Kansas City's buildings have already been lost. Most could have been saved if people had gotten involved sooner. Teardown Tattler monitors the city’s 311 database for dangerous building notices, allows users to sign up to get an email notification of new notices as well as browse the site for map of current notices. The target user is any concerned citizen, but especially those who want to affect urban planning and already community organize around planning decisions.

Achieved in a weekend: built front end page, scrape 311 data, Google street view of the buildings, email notification

Needs: Add monitoring of demolition permits, but that’s often too late in the process to save a building so we'll architect a process to identify at risk buildings using water shutoff data and other key indicators of demolition. Add user-specified geographic areas for monitoring/notifications and saving multiple locations. Add Advocacy arm utilizing Neighborland API.

Civic Tech Expo

Some great organizations also came out to share how they’re making a better Kansas City. We had booths from Boys Grow, Urban Harvest KC, Kansas City Maker Faire, Connecting for Good, and a DIY touchtable running OpenPlans.

Want to do more?

If you love these projects and want to build more civic tech for Kansas City, join the Brigade!

Organizers

HackKC was organized by Jase Wilson of Neighbor.ly, Will Barkis from the Mozilla Foundation, Ariel Kennan and Andrew Hyder from Code for America, and Aaaron Deacon from KC Digital Drive.

Thank You to our Sponsors

Intel, Mozilla Foundation, Google Fiber, KCNext

[mainecivichackday-blog]

BANGOR, Maine — On the nicest days of the year so far, 20 programmers in Bangor spent the weekend inside, donating time to hack projects for their local governments. The projects in Bangor included a tool to track the location of city vehicles such as snow plows and street sweepers ...

[minsunmini-blog]

EDesign Lab Hackathon (6.1.13 - 6.2.13)

This weekend was National Day of Civic Hacking. Rae Milne, my lovely friend and classmate, invited me to join her and her husband to do some design/hacking. Since the topic was Design Education, I decided to join their team. 

We got together briefly on Friday night to brainstorm over pizza and beer and decided that we wanted to tackle "learning writing." On Saturday morning, we met up at Center for Social Innovation in Chelsea to hack.

We came up with pretty complicated writing, collaborating iPad app, but after a feedback from actual teachers, we trimmed down our idea. We worked hard that night and came back the next day to tackle our project.

We ended up making a iPad app to enhance creative writing skill, named MiniStories. We wanted to address the importance of writing skill and how we can make learning writing fun and constructive. Through our app students can learn to build descriptive profile as well as build a scene and write about a scene. Please check out our project on hacker league project page.

We also received Student's Choice Award. I am happy that student judges liked our work. Ed Design Labs also celebrated Rae's birthday after the presentation. It was fun weekend and I enjoyed working with Rae and Chris. I have high hope for the future of education. 

Thank you Ed Design Labs for a great experience and hope to see you guys again.

[kevincurry]

This is the story of how we planned and pulled off the first City of Houston Hackathon. It has an ensemble cast filled with software developers, elected officials, policy wonks, civic innovators, bagels, and bahn mi. And like so many good stories, this one begins at a bar.

[codeforamerica]

Civic Hacking Icons from Iconathon. More at The Noun Project.

[andrewhazlett]

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake @MayorSRB addresses the #hackforchange crowd! We are official! (at Hack For Change Baltimore)

[codeforbtv]

National Day of Civic Hacking banner on Burlington City Hall

[code4novabrigade]

Michelle Koeth, Co-Captain of the Code for Nova Brigade, shares thoughts on today's hackathon and her hopes for the future.

[blemmerman]

Proposal for Bicycle-Friendly Streets Starting in Miami-Dade County

As of June 2, 2013 at Miami's National Day of Civic Hacking - this idea is only a couple days old, and can use your help. Please contact me if you would like to contribute.

Miami-Dade citizens have the perception that their streets are unsafe for bicyclists due to the many bike and pedestrian related auto accidents we hear about in the media and experience ourselves (I’ve been in two bike accidents, myself). This is a phenomenon that puts the brakes on many of the county’s health and sustainability related initiatives in an era when the rest of the world is making a return toward building livable and walkable places.

We seek to alter the current conversation about bike safety in Miami-Dade in order to increase the number of cyclists on the road, thereby reducing the number of automobiles and improving safety. As an added bonus, the increase in cycling will lead to the greater fitness and sociability of our citizens, while reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we pump into our atmosphere.

To do this, we must first discover whether there is bicycle-related data to support or overthrow the current perception that Dade County’s streets are dangerous for cyclists. Studies have been conducted by independent organizations, but our team hasn’t yet found any bike-related data from Miami-Dade County. Data could also be scraped from news stories featuring these types of incidents.

The data we seek concerns the number of bike to automobile related accidents that have taken place within the county limits, where they took place, and when. We can use this data to determine what the frequency of bike to automobile related incidents are, and pinpoint the hotspots where accidents occur most in the county. If records of incidents involving bicycles cannot be found, purely automobile-related incidents will suffice as a measure of danger in our streets.

Because safety and danger are comparative terms (i.e. when people say that flying is safe, one could argue that planes have fallen out of the sky and killed people. Therefore, it’s more appropriate to compare the safety of flying to an activity like driving, which is responsible for a higher frequency of death and injury), we need to compare the relative safety of Miami-Dade’s streets to the safety of a place like Portland (everybody wants to beat Portland), renowned for its bike-oriented culture.

Not only must we compare the rates of death and injury to change the current perception, but there are other factors such as the quality of a person’s bicycle commute that contributes to their propensity or reluctance to ride. Current mobile technologies now allow us to track things like:

Vector data of individual commutes.

Distance of a commute v. time travelled, compared to other places, which would tell us about the overall ease of bike travel.

Time of day travelled.

Velocity during any given moment in a commute as determined by GPS, which would tell us about the friction (not the roughness of the asphalt, but the general surroundings such as the effectiveness of bike lanes, sharrows, road width, traffic conditions, etc.) of the road.

Acceleration and deceleration during a commute, which would tell us about the obstacles (including accidents) encountered during a trip. Accelerometers in smartphones are now sensitive enough to record the vibrations resulting from bike tires rolling over asphalt – one way of determining the overall quality of our pavement very inexpensively on a continual basis. Imagine thousands of cyclists commuting every day for years through nearly every street in the county measuring the road quality.

Type of commute being made – manually inputted by the cyclist.

Work commute. More rides in this category indicate a concentration of cyclists dealing with rush hour traffic.

Running errands.

Leisure ride. More rides in this category indicate either that people have a lot of time on their hands, or that Miami-Dade truly is a great place for cyclists to ride.

The aforementioned data, except the type of commute being made, have already been collected all over the world by independent applications such as MapMyRide and Garmin Connect, but it is not publicly available. We propose connecting with these companies to gain access to their data for the purposes of our public safety study.

If, after these comparisons, we determine that our streets are inherently unsafe for cyclists, we now have the proper information to open a dialogue for change between our municipalities and our citizens.

If, on the other hand, we determine that our streets are safe, we propose expanding upon our county’s safe streets by empowering citizens with knowledge of where problem areas are, and giving them an ongoing means to communicate to the county what works and what doesn’t work for cyclists in our streets.

We propose creating a mobile application for cyclists that does this by accomplishing three objectives, while utilizing a combination of government and user generated data.

The app will collect data related to ride quality previously mentioned by using technology that powers apps like MapMyRide. I smell a partnership.

Vector data for individual commutes.

Distance and time traveled.

Time of day.

Velocity.

Acceleration/deceleration.

Type of ride.

It allows users to submit positive and negative events to a database during or after a commute using a combination of text and photos. They can pinpoint their recorded incidents on a map within the application.

It warns cyclists of accident-prone areas nearby by displaying automobile accident datapoints on the map near the cyclists’ current location and, and it generates an audio signal. It will also display points representing other people’s positive and negative submissions.

To constrain the scope of the project in the interest of time, money and usability, this app will not include a way to make friends, track past routes, beat your best times, or comment on other people’s submissions. It will, however, require a valid login to authenticate collected data, and borrow certain functions directly from another application that does these social things. It also will not allow cyclists to interpolate the best routes to take between points A and B. We have Google Maps and MapQuest for that.

The data input from this application is meant to be monitored and added to by government agencies. In an ideal world, all of these agencies would be using a standardized API. With the knowledge that Miami-Dade County has begun the process of standardizing an API across its 34 municipalities, we feel there is a possibility that outside agencies will adopt their API, making the utilization of this application integral to their own bicycle safety initiatives.

Miami-Dade County already has a bicycle route-related website in partnership with FIU called the Bicycle Knowledge Explorer, which is designed to collect some of the commute quality data I’ve talked about. It could serve as a parent website to the mobile app with some refinement to its features.