Report from the ATX Hackathon for Change
The weekend of Jun 1-2 was National Days of Civic Hacking across the nation. The local NDoCH event was the ATX Hackathon for Change, held on the St. Edward's University Campus. The event was produced by the St. Edward's Office of Information Technology, with support from Open Austin and the UT Food Lab. Numerous sponsors, both local and national, helped underwrite the costs of the event.
The event was -- beyond a doubt -- the most widely attended and successful civic hacking event ever held in Austin. Approximately 60 people attended the kick-off session, and an even larger number gathered at the end of the event for final presentations.
City of Austin Council Member Laura Morrison and St. Edward's University Vice President for Information Technology David Waldron joined in the opening session, and offered welcoming comments to the hackers and participating non-profits. The attendees were queried as to how many had participated in a hacking event before, and over half said they had not. But not to fear; the operating principles were explained. Then everybody with a project idea was offered an opportunity to make a two-minute "pitch" to the hackers.
A stunning total of 19 potential projects were pitched to attendees. This is a testament to the support civic hackers enjoy from both the City of Austin and the local non-profit community. The City of Austin Public Works Department, for instance, was responsible for offering three proposals, backed by either app use cases or recently released datasets.
After the opening session presentations the hackers selected which projects they wanted to work on. Unfortunately, the number of pitches exceeded the capacity of the hackers. The participants selected nine projects for hacking. That's, unfortunately, only a fraction of the total offered, but it's more than twice the number taken up at any previous civic hackathon in Austin.
The selected projects were:
- Agenda Alerts
- Art Finder
- Austin Recycles
- Bike Share Locator
- Connect2Good
- Food Lab Mapathon
- Getting Them Home
- Keep Austin Fed
- TEC Filer
Visit the event wiki for more information on the project proposals.
The closing session was open to the public, to view the results of the weekend. Seven of the projects presented the work they did, with demos and prototypes. A panel of subject matter experts provided their feedback to the groups, along with questions and advice to help move their projects on towards full implementation.
The ATX Hackathon for Change was one of two hacking events held in Austin this past weekend. The Austin American-Statesman wrote up a summary of the events: Dual hackathons lure creative thinkers.
KVUE-TV interviewed Claire Jordan on Saturday morning, in advance of the event. That interview is here: Computer hacking for a good cause
Open Austin invites any of the participants who want to continue the work they started, as well as those who want to join in on civic hacking efforts, to join us for one of our Open Government Hack Nights. The next one will be Monday, June 10, back on the St. Edward's campus. See the calendar in the sidebar for info on our upcoming events.