The annual National Day of Civic Hacking, a Code for America Brigade organized event, is the coming together of civic technologists, coders, developers, government SMEs and engaged citizens to help collaborate and co-create applications to help make the interface to government more seamless and frictionless. There’s a long way to go to improve the user interface to government but events like this help to move the needle on a transparency and the citizen-government interaction.
This year’s Code for Hawaii focus was on specific apps/projects. The Hawaii brigade spent the last 9 months regularly meeting two Wednesdays out of each month to work on these projects. Today’s #HackforChange was an opportunity to spend the better part of the whole day moving these projects closer to completion.
The four projects were:
- Hawaii State Budget Visualization: A project to map and visualize budget data to expenditures
- BikeShare: A bike share utilization project
- UIPA Records Request: A user friendly records request system to make it easier to submit and track UIPA requests
- Maker Hawaii: A project in partnership with the Hawaii State Public Libraries to map existing makerspaces
The fifth project area was a Code for America Challenge to research citizen onboarding for specific tasks like applying for a business license, affordable housing, food stamps, victim compensation and others.
As you can see, there’s still a lot of work to be done but great progress was done today. To see photos from today’s event, check out my Flickr album. Cover photo (l:r) Joe Heaukulani, Ryan Kanno, Russ Tokuyama, Jon Geyer, McKay Davis.