Hack for Change Louisville is being held as the city's formal National Day of Civic Hacking event. The day will bring together local government leaders and staff, local organizations, businesses, visitors, and community members and is focused on civic innovation. Most of the activities are in the early planning stage, but we anticipate: 

• Software development (a hackathon event) using the city's open data.
• Collaborative building of open data apps and services.
• Discussions on open data the city, county, and state should release.

The initiative is a united effort to connect citizens and government in a partnership focused on improving people’s daily lives through technology. This event will bring together techies, entrepreneurs, do-gooders, activists and others like you from across the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent tools using publicly-released data.

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Hack for Change

Together across America, these events will provide citizens with an opportunity to do what is most quintessentially American: roll up our sleeves, get involved and work together to improve our neighborhoods, our lives and our government. 

Civic hacking as a form of citizen engagement and volunteerism is gaining momentum reaching cities across America not those known for technology and innovation. Civic hackers are already active and contributing to the betterment of your community. 

Originally the event was going to be competitive, like Code for America's recent Hack-a-thon.  But the spirit of this event is collaboration, cooperation, and learning.  So there will be no prizes, just awesome ideas and apps that we create during and after the event! 

The Story

The White House's Code for America fellows came to Louisville and hosted a Hack-a-Thon in February.  The YourMapper team won first place for its public safety app SafetyCheck which uses crime reports from the city's open data portal.  

Now Michael Schnuerle from that team is organizing the Louisville chapter of the National Day of Civic Hacking event, as a way to get more local developers involved in local civic volunteerism.  

This event will be community building, and raise awareness for what can be done by developers to help citizens solve problems using open data.  

Lexington, KY is also hosting an event, using Lexington's open data portal, making the effort a state-wide collaboration. 

Get $100 in free Amazon AWS Cloud services!  Sign up now and participate to get your credit the day of the event.

Examples 

Here are some examples of apps built of public open data.

• SafetyCheck - Immediate crime score at your location.
• YourMapper - Browse public data around your location.
• Bus Stop DC - Real time DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia bus predictions.
• Don't Eat At - Alert when you check into a restaurant risking closure for health violations.

Goals

Hack for Change Louisville has these main goals:

• Create a one-day environment for entrepreneurs, app developers, and programmers to create innovative apps and websites using open public data.
• Identify opportunities to brainstorm, capture, design, and even deploy valuable software applications that serve the city.
• Bring together local government officials, municipal employees, experts, programmers, designers, citizens and journalists to share thoughts on the City of Louisville's open data portal.
• Foster communities of practice and advocacy on the role of the civic innovation, mobile communication, online information, and open data at the City of Louisville.
• Discover other datasets that contain public information a the city, county, and state level that should be made public (property, transit, GIS, etc).
• Create outcomes that participants will act upon after the event is over.

The event is currently sponsored and orgainzed by YourMapper, which provides mapping local open data solutions and an open data API for your apps.  We are looking for other volunteers and sponsors now.

Sign Up

Sign up now at our Eventbrite page.  Space is limited!

Schedule

The event will be at Louisville's iHub co-working space.

9am - Introductions and overview, breakfast

9:30 - Data, project/app ideas

10 - Break into self-organized groups to work on ideas

12 - Lunch on site

1 - Continue working on ideas, finish prototype

3:30 - Present prototypes

4:30 - Next steps, mailing lists/groups, wrap-up

5 - Civic Hacking end, head off to dinner and drinks with your new friends

What to Bring

Your laptop, power cables, software, smart phones, chargers, monitors, mice, ideas, and half finished projects.

How to Prepare

Familiarize yourself with at these data sources to see what's out there:

• Louisville Open Data Portal
• Data.gov
• TARC's Transit Feed
• YourMapper (get a free account and API key before the event)
• Metro Mapper's Local Open Data Lists

The event is meant to be a technical programming, app building, hacking experience.  We will be working together to build actual apps during the event.

If you are non-technical, we still need your help.  During the event entreprenuers, business, marketing, and regular citizens can help steer the direction of the developement and explore great ideas with the techies, and work on the presentation and communitating the idea clearly.  You can also spend some time updating your neighborhood's Open Street Map data using the new iD online editing tool.

Official Louisville Twitter tag: #hackville

Just upload any information you have about your civic hacking project.

• Cooperation
  This is a collaborative event, so there is no judging.