Hack N Akron - A Civic Hackathon Powered by Launch League

Join us to help shape Akron! 

We're bringing together a bunch of Akron's tech, business, and design talent with city officials to solve some of the city's biggest challenges.

Agenda:

7:30 Doors open
8:00am Welcome by Mayor Horrigan
8:15am Team Introductions
8:30 start working
12:00pm Lunch
5:00pm Dinner
7:00pm Demo to the City
8:00pm Fin

The first big challenge we will be tackling will be to create an open data API for the city: 

After reviewing the list of areas in which the city of Akron has identified opportunities to use technology, we have decided that the best route to take initially is to create a base-layer open data API. What we found is that many of the requests revolve around the standardization and consumption of city data to solve or improve problem situations including: better marketing of the city and privately owned vacant lots, promoting business and other well-known districts, city dashboards with useful metrics, shelter rentals, community learning center rentals, and marketing of the community learning centers. All of those problems can be tackled more efficiently and effectively if we were to have a standard aggregation of open data. Open data is a term that has gotten a lot of traction recently, and has many other benefits than just helping us tackle these requested improvements.

WHAT IS OPEN DATA AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR THE CITY?

Open data is a repository of standardized data that is easily accessible, searchable, and relatable to the public. Creating such a repository would mean opening up access to local government data which could be consumed by any web or other application. As of December of 2015, there were 109 cities participating in this new movement, the top 5 of which are Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia¹. When opening data to the public, cities have found meaningful impacts including, but not limited to: cost savings, efficiency, fuel for business, improved civic services, informed policy, performance planning, research and scientific discoveries, transparency and accountability, and increased public participation in the democratic dialogue².

WHAT WILL THIS PROJECT ACCOMPLISH?

A successful event for us will yield a basic API that exposes a certain single sector of city data. We understand that the city is excited to share its data with its people, and we are excited to begin this journey, but we are limited in our time at this event and are not looking to ask more of our volunteers than the quarterly single-day hackathon. If we could aggregate and standardize the data of one sector of local government so that the public can consume and build on it, we would consider the initial project a success.

Not convinced? Check out this project done in Los Angeles called StreetWize that was spurred off from a voluntary hackathon whose goal was to create an open API for the city's streets and utilities:http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/Open-Data-APIs-Collecting-and-Consuming-What-Cities-Produce.html

The second big challenge we are tackling is neighborhood branding:

From the Center for Community Progress: The purpose of neighborhood marketing is to build a positive image that attracts the desired investments of time, money and energy that support the neighborhood’s revitalization goals. Successful neighborhood marketing is very clear about what it hopes to accomplish, who its target markets are, and the messages that will cultivate the desired response from those target markets. 

By solidifying the various neighborhood's identities and bringing organized neighborhood leadership together we expect this will allow our communities to better engage, attract, and retain residents thus boosting Akron as a whole. 

WHAT WILL THIS PROJECT ACCOMPLISH?

A successful event will define the goal of the branding/marketing, identify the target audience, determine the core components of the neighborhood brand, and the creation of a logo to reinforce the neighborhood brand.