HackVT - A Great Event Pulled Off
Saturnalian thanks to the organizers and volunteers of HackVT, Vermont's biggest showcase of native coding talent. Over 24 hours participants were asked to develop a new application based on mashups of any of 75 data sources in 15 categories including agriculture, climate, and recreation. North of 40 teams registered, accounting for something upward of 120 participants who, from 6PM Friday to 3PM Saturday, were holed up in the ground floor Winooski Mill digs of MyWebGrocer.com.
The overarching goal for the weekend hack was for teams to build a killer app for the state of Vermont that, to paraphrase, pertains to Vermont in some special way...and expresses the Vermont theme.
One highlight for both Jim and I was to see the preponderance of students - Vermont's tech future is looking pretty bright. We had a great time meeting our neighbors from the game design program at Champlain College. Other than a few brisk strolls and a 6AM game of pingpong, sad to say it was all work work work. And the volunteers and amazing food made it oh so so easy to focus on the work. And eating. And work...
Team Dirty Data, myself and Jim Carroll, spent a lot of our early time looking through the data sets to understand which ones might present a compelling user experience, at least in part driven by a powerful narrative quality. What we found was that state education data is incredibly robust, yet poorly organized for everyday consumers such as parents and tax payers. We thought we could add some pretty fast value there for both the agency and Vermonters.
What was interesting was that, as we explored the power of the data to help Vermonters gain local and contextual data on school performance, there could be a powerful model here for other urgent issues facing Vermonters, for example renewable energy development, health care, and natural resource management.
(Pic @HackVT via Twitter)
We designed and built from the ground up an application for the web that we called Vermont Perspective Builder, with the goal of presenting a snapshot of school performance using key indicators as well as a geolocation of schools that are comparable by key indicators including enrollment size, expenditure per pupil, and Homestead Tax Rate. Interaction with this "dashboard" data can be deepened by comparing these performance indicators with those of another school in the state, either one that appears on the Google map, by user input, or by a random "roll of the dice."
Finally, and the piece we didn't get to build, would be the idea of "socializing" this perspective - inviting users to interact with it by contributing anecdotes, photographs, or additional data sets that relate directly to the issue at hand and sharing/inviting interaction from their social networks. We hope this could be especially useful around cultural touchstone moments in Vermont such as in advance of town meeting.
Process-wise, we began by diagramming workflows, gathering data sets. As Jim pulled together code libraries, set up the data base, and imported our cleaned up tables, I developed the wireframes, we refined them together, then I build the .png files that Jim used to steer coding. The Perspective Builder was built with Django and jQuery, Python used to handle SQL imports.
(Pic @HackVT via Instagram)
At the end of the day it looks like there were two honorable mentions, to Tyler Machado who developed a farmers' market finder, and Teams DGC and C2 Code Lunatics. Winning teams are: Student Prize to team Collateral Damage (can't remember!), Third Place to Team Bean (a relocation to Vermont app), Second Place to us, Dirty Data, and First Place to Data Metamorphosis (a svelt shopping app).
All the way around, a great time - thank you much, HackVT and see you next year. Click here for coverage on ABC's Fox44.