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