Hack N Akron 2.0

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
8:00a Welcome by Mayor Horrigan
8:15a Team Introductions
8:30 Start Working
12:00p Lunch
5:00p Dinner
7:00p Demo to the City
8:00p Fin

How does this all work?

We have a small group of people that are putting together all of the preliminary work for this event. A steering comittee planning the event, ordering coffee and food and the like and Project Managers, gathering requirements and determining team needs in advance. The week before, we will work together to put all the volunteers into teams that we feel will be most effective. We will build a list of tentative teams and the day of the event, we'll have a plan to introduce everyone on each team to the rest of his or her teamates. Of course, we won't get it all right the first time so we'll likely move some people around throughout the day.

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.

Using the momentum from our last hackathon we were able to create a system that imports all of the data that we received into our new Open Data system! A successful hackathon will yield three things:
1. A way to make all of that data available to other software developers and platforms through a public API.
2. The beginning of the official “Akron City Health Dashboard” - A dashboard that we will be adding to as we continue to consume more data from the city.
3. An innovative, new application that will be brainstormed and implemented by a select group of our volunteers that will be assigned to our “innovation” team.

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. For this event, we will be focusing on North Hill and Middleburry.

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.

The third big challenge we are tackling is CLC Reservations:

The Akron School System is built around the idea of Community Learning Centers. This means that all Akron Schools are available to the community for use. This is why many of us are able to vote at an Akron school facility. Unfortunately, the CLCs do not have an easy system to allow the community to review the sites, look at the schedule of availability, or reserve a room at a center.

Hack N Akron will have a team that wil build out a site that helps expose the availabiity of the CLCs to the community, making it more likely that people will use these great community resources.