Four Civic Hackathon Videos

Yesterday I blasted you with a whole load of links and info about water and air citizen science in the post, "Part 3 Citizen Science + Civic Hacking: Clean Water & Clean Air." Most people probably read about three lines of that post. Or maybe one line.

So today's post takes a 180 degree turn. Below are several civic hackathon videos. No reading required.

If you are relatively new to civic hacking and haven't seen Catherine Bracy's TED video, "Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens," that's a good video to get a general understanding of civic hacking.

Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens

Your next assignment is to watch the Sacramento video from their National Day of Civic Hacking 2013 event, "Code for Sacramento: How Civic Hacking Helps Our Cities." It's a four minute video that gives a decent look at a participant-driven civic hackathon. The Sacramento video is a Vimeo video rather than YouTube and didn't seem to want to be embedded into this blog, so just click on the link above in this paragraph.

The Reno 2011 civic hackathon had an interesting twist. They decided that since they were hacking open data, they'd work on it 'in the open,' meaning outside. It's a cute bit of wordplay, but having used laptops outside, I'm glad I wasn't one of those civic hackers in Reno dealing with daylight glare on a computer screen.

Reno 2011 civic hackathon

The last video for you today is from the "AT&T Civic App Challenge & Hackathon" and shows you the classic style of coders working with publicly available data in Rochester, NY. This civic hackathon was more focused on college students than on the general populations of Rochester.

AT&T Civic Hackathon in Rochester

As you can see from the above four videos, civic hackathons can be quite different from each other. What you see in these four videos isn't necessarily what you'll see on June 6, 2015, in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. And what you see in Appleton in 2015 could be totally different from a civic hackathon in De Pere in 2015, or what you would experience at an Appleton civic hackathon in 2016.

Hope to see you on June 6th at the "DHMN Civic Hackathon/Appleton 2015."

[Apologies for saying 'no reading' then putting a bunch of words in this post...]

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