Winners of #bostonhack
By Jeff Moriarty, VP of Digital Products
The winners of the first Boston Hack Day Challenge are KnowEssentials and Boston Green, which demonstrate the wide variety of hacks created in a mere 48 hours. The first is an SMS message system to connect people without smartphones to food, shelter, and health resources in the community; the other is a website to show people the green spaces near them and activities going on there.
Winner of the Best Mobile App (as well as the crowd favorite) is Drunken Stumble, a mobile app to help you plan a pub crawl (including walking directions and taxi numbers at the end). Winner of most-Boston-centric hack is CanHazParking, a website to tell you whether you can park or not where you are. Best use of Geo-location went to Accessible Places, a crowdsourced app to let you find out, as the name implies, what locations around town are accessible. Best News hack went to Big News Boston, a visualization of what news from Boston.com is being read right now (we’ll be bringing that app to our site once the developers get some sleep and clean up their code). Best Social hack went to a team called Zombie Programmers, who created a crowdsourced app for Green Line trains, ahead of the MBTA releasing official data.
Once these apps are stable, we’ll be featuring them on beta.boston.com.
A few comments from the judges on their way out: Globe Publisher Chris Mayer says “it was tough to choose between the great collection of apps.” Laurel Ruma of O’Reilly media says “it’s exciting to see such innovative uses of open government data and to see Boston take its place on the national scene as a city for developers.” Another judge, Scott Kirsner gave his take on the winners in his blog on Boston.com
Here’s a video shot by the Globe that captured some of the fun the participants had hacking, as well as the announcement of the winners.
Thanks to everyone who came and participated. It was a fun and productive weekend. We’ll try to do this again next year. With even more Red Bull.