Civic hacking day aims to improve technological experience
Over the span of 48 hours, programmers at Gangplank in Chandler created a website for citizens to submit and vote on suggestions for their local governments.
City Ideas is one tangible outcome of the National Day of Civic Hacking, which was held Saturday and Sunday at about 95 locations throughout the country, including in Chandler and Phoenix.
The nationwide event was designed to bring together gov- ernment agencies and people with data expertise to create useful applications to improve the community.
While many people associate hacking with breaking into computer systems, participants in these events describe a hacker as a tinkerer: someone who uses ingenuity to create or fix something.
“The term ‘hacker’ is for people who understand the system so well that they can manipulate the data in ways other people can’t,” said Derek Neighbors, co-founder of the collaborative workspace Gangplank.
“What we’re doing is opening up a form of communication and collaboration in a pretty unprecedented way,” said Rachel Sherman, a community volunteer coordinator for Radio Campesina Network, which hosted
the Alternative and Independent Media Forum at the Arizona Latino Arts and Cultural Center in Phoenix on Sunday.
Government organizations such as NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the White House posted challenges for participants along with data sets.
While the Phoenix-area events hosted by Radio Campesina Network and Gangplank focused initially on local efforts, being part of a national push will give more weight to the project and also create a broader network, participants said.
“All together we made a huge difference in the community,” said David Monaghan, who leads the Gangplank Labs initiative and organized the civic hacking event in Chandler.
Participants in the two-day event at Gangplank are also working on a phone application to consolidate information about farmers markets throughout the state and a way to make U.S. Census Bureau data more accessible and userfriendly, Neighbors said.
Radio Campesina Network had a different take on how to meet the goals of the national event to improve communities.
The organization hosted a forum in Phoenix to discuss how alternative media can increase civic engagement. One aspect they considered was how to better publicize arts and other events in a way that will create a more cohesive community, Sherman said.
“It’s not coding, and it’s not developing, but it is absolutely still the tech generation,” Sherman said.
There is a significant potential to harness both public data and the personal information collected through smartphones and computers to create something more than recommendations from online retailers based on purchase history, said Brandon Barnett, director of business innovation at Intel Corp., the main sponsor of the National Day of Civic Hacking. If the data is presented in an accessible way, people can use this information to solve problems and make better decisions.
“The sensors that are proliferating the world really are creating digital data about everything,” Barnett said.
“There’s potential to have huge value out of that for individuals.”
Organizers of both Arizona events said they hoped this event would be the beginning of more collaboration in the future.
The first suggestion posted on the still-basic City Ideas, cityideas.herokuapp.com, was to organize a quarterly “hackathon” event to create Chandler-specific apps.
“People are thinking about ways they can make where they live better,” Neighbors said. “I think this is a conversation that will continue.”
‘‘ There were several rescues on Piestewa Peak and Pinnacle Peak, and it’s because the heat gets to you.”
National Weather Service in Phoenix