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Code For America

17 Oct

I got the Fellowship! I’m spending 2013 hacking on cities with Code For America. Yeah yeah yeah!

Code For America is a new organization that helps upgrade cities. It has quickly become the most distinguished force in the emerging open government, smart city movement. It’s like ‘PeaceCorps for geeks’ which I’m way down with.

They’ll send me out to one of the 2013 partner cities where I’ll get to flip the local government onto state of the art tech. My first job will be to meet tons of government employees and community leaders and just listen. After hearing what the local problems are and figuring out the local political quilt, I’ll come back to San Francisco for the rest of the year and hack. I’ll have the opportunity to hack on solving the specific problems my partner city faces, and solve them in a way that is scalable to any city in the world.

If the quality of projects from the past years Fellows are any example, its going to be an immensely exciting, yet challenging year. Bring it.

2013, the official year of Hack Your City.

Here is the Code For America founder and executive director, Jennifer Pahlka preaching church at TED.

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The Summer of Smart

6 Jul

Flick from summerofsmart.org

The era of urban hacking has arrived. The city of San Francisco is throwing a ‘Summer of Smart’ effort to get urban and civic hackers of all stripes to start working together. Local arts orgs and the relevant City departments have partnered to create space and time for designers, developers, journalists, and activists to make apps and tech solutions to important urban problems. These ‘Civic Hackers’ will link over the summer for a few super intense creative sessions called hackathons.

There are going to be three weekend long hackathons. These are events where interested people meet up to code  and draw like mad for 48 hours straight. At the end of the weekend they compare their achievements and party. The first of these three weekends just happened and it was rad sounding. The Gray Area Gallery gathered SF’s finest civic hackers to work on the themes of Community Development and Public Art. Unfortunately I was only able to stay for the keynotes and the introductions, but the list of projects made is super impressive.

The started projects include Art Mapper,  a slick twitter based app that maps out all the pics of Street Art sent to it. Also surprising it hadn’t been made yet is Public Art Spaces.  Additionally, there were location constrained digital bulletin boards, and even a tool to help make paying taxes fun. Keep on eye on YayTaxes.org. There were many more ideas passed around during the introduction that didn’t get teams. My favorite idea presented was a kickstarterish way to crowdsource funds for urban renewal. Such as community funded gardens, bike paths, and the like. Holler at me if you want to work on that one sometime.

There are two more hackathons happening this Summer. Sustainability and Transportation at the end of July and Public Health and Food in August. These events aren’t just for computer programmers, come through if you have any ideas or desires to be a part of the new civic hacker movement.

Gavin Newsom came through the first hackathon, here he is talking about the importance of Open Gov, Open Data and Civic Hacking. 

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