June 6th Challenges For Civic Hackers

One way to while away your hours during the National Day of Civic Hacking (NDoCH) is to work on one of the civic hack challenges that various organizations have set up.

Below are a bunch of the civic hack challenges you can work on during the "DHMN Civic Hackathon/Appleton 2015." The Code for America blog post where this list of challenges came from had a couple more listed, but I covered a couple of them in earlier posts, such as "Hack Challenges: National Day of Civic Hacking 2015," and a couple of other ones in the CfA post indicated the challenges haven't been fully launched yet. If you see a challenge you'd like to work on, click on the link to learn more about it. There will likely be more civic hack challenges announced before the NDoCH, and I'll post them on this blog as soon as I am aware of them.

1. Avian Infographics: Connect people with the science of conservation and wildlife management.
2. Innovative Access to Scientific Reference Data: Improve access to NIST Standard Reference Data (SRD) by developing apps that allows scientists and students to find and download data quickly with mobile devices.
3. International Travel Guide: Develop a guide that integrates the State Department’s travel advisory API to display safe travel tips.
4. Health Impacts of Climate: Develop ways to turn available climate change data into useful and accessible information for citizens in order to help them better adapt to and manage climate variability.
5. Mapping America: Create maps that help explain and communicate issues facing your neighbors.
6. Open Data City Sustainability Solutions: Create an application leveraging the U.S. Census Bureau’s City SDK that addresses an integrated sustainability problem in your city.
7. Open Foreign Assistance: Develop insights from the foreignassistance.gov data to show taxpayers how 1% of their tax dollars are being spent.
8. Trademark Scavenger Hunt: Create a mobile photo scavenger hunt game to challenge your
   friends to find some of the registered trademarks all around us.
9. Twittering Birds: Develop applications that access and display publicly available data from social media to map and highlight and educate about urban bird conservation.
10. Two Factor Frenzy: Develop a tool that show users which sites currently offer multi-factor authentication, with information tailored to the user based on their online habits.
11. WorldWise Schools Redesign: Create a tool to connect Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) serving abroad, and Returned PCVs with interested Educators and classrooms back in the US.
    

 If you want to work on one of the challenges, it's a good idea to research the topic before June 6 so you can hit the ground running that morning. It might also be helpful if you recruit one or two people to come to the hackathon and work with you on the challenge.

Code for America's NDoCH webpage shows most (all?) of the June 6 civic hacking challenges.

Reminder: Only one more day to submit a suggestion for the Knight Prototype Fund. See the post "Appleton Challenge: Submit Civic Hack Idea To Knight Prototype Fund By May 15" for details.

*****