Civic Hacking Event: July 22, Appleton, The Avenue HQ

UPDATE: Omni Resources will be providing pizza for the July 22 civic hacking at The Avenue HQ! Thanks, Omni!

The next NE Wisconsin civic hacking event will happen on Wednesday evening, July 22, 2015 in downtown Appleton at The Avenue HQ, starting at 6 PM.

The Avenue HQ (AHQ) is Appleton’s coworking space, located at 120 N Morrison St, Suite 101,
Appleton WI 54911. Click here for a location map.

What Time:  The nominal start time on July 22 is 6 PM, but no worries if you can’t come until later or if you want to show up earlier. This will be an informal evening of civic hacking; no formal agenda. No definite end time, depends on who shows up and how much fun people are having!

Who Should Show Up:  Anybody who’s interested in civic hacking should come to this event. You should definitely come if you participated in the DHMN Civic Hackathon/Appleton 2015 on June 6. You should definitely come if you registered for the June 6 hackathon but weren’t able to make it to the event. And you should definitely come if you think you might enjoy civic hacking -- even if you didn’t participate in the June 6 event and didn’t register for the hackathon.

Coders will enjoy the fun at AHQ on July 22, but non-coders are also encouraged to participate, as discussed in “What Are Some Non-coder Activities In Civic Hacking?” There will be at least one designer there and at least one non-coder, non-designer, so you definitely don’t need to be a coder to participate in civic hacking.

What Will We Do:  Mike Putnam will be there to lead the charge on civic hacks related to the AppletonAPI he wrote. We had lots of people working on stuff related to AppletonAPI at the June 6 civic hackathon. Mike Rosack will be at AHQ and, among other things, will be working on his civic hack API locator which was started during the June hackathon. Ross Larson built a recycling-related Pebble smartwatch app at the hackathon. He’ll have more info on Pebble configuration pages and will likely work on that at AHQ. I’m hoping some of the others who worked on projects related to AppletonAPI and the “Is It Recycling Week?” Android app will show up on July 22 to continue work on that ecosystem of civic hacks.

It would be great if we can launch, or make plans to launch, one or several new civic hacks on July 22. For some ideas of what other civic hacks for NE Wisconsin could be worked on at AHQ, read “Seed Projects For Civic Hackathons.”

If you weren’t at the June 6th civic hackathon in Appleton, no worries. We’ll bring you up to speed and answer your questions about civic hacking, then get you connected with an existing civic hack project or help you get your own project started.

What Should I Bring:  The main things to bring are (1) yourself, (2) friends or acquaintances who might enjoy civic hacking, (3) laptop and charger (or other tools for the type of civic hacking you want to work on), (4) willingness to either lead a civic hack project or work on someone else’s civic hack project. Check out “Day-After Report: DHMN Civic Hackathon/Appleton 2015” for some idea of what was worked on during the June 6 hackathon.

We might have some munchies and beverages if a couple sponsors volunteer to make civic hacking in NE Wisconsin more fun by covering that cost. I’ll update this post regarding sponsors and also let civic hackers know on the #dhmncivichacks channel on Slack.

What IS Civic Hacking??:  If you don’t know what civic hacking is, watch the Catherine Bracy TED video “Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens.”

If you want to read more about what civic hacking is, check out “What Is Civic Hacking??” and scan through the titles of other posts on this blog for ones that are of interest to you -- see the list of titles in the right column under Blog Archive.

As always, if you have civic hacking questions or suggestions, email Bob Waldron at bwaldron (at) gmail [dott] com.

Hope to see you in Appleton at The Avenue HQ on the evening of July 22!

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