An apropos way to help the NE Wisconsin civic hacking community grow and be able to enjoy the visible and tangible fruits of work on civic tech is to plant and cultivate a few seed projects.
You might ask, ‘why do you think seed projects will help the next hackathon?’ The great ecosystem that developed around Mike Putnam’s AppletonAPI and “Is It Recycling Week?” app (IIRW) at the June 6 hackathon is clear evidence of the value of seed projects. Mike’s two hacks gave other people something to contribute to and showed them a real-life local example of civic hacking that they could copy, leverage or do a riff on. You can read about that in “Day-After Report: DHMN Civic Hackathon/Appleton 2015” and in an upcoming post from Mike. Depending on how things develop, one of the projects inspired by Mike’s work might even spin off into its own seed project.
We’ve made progress toward launching a second civic hack seed in NE Wisconsin -- a Community Mesh Network project. There are five people who’ve said they want to be part of the project team. (If you’re reading this and want to get involved with a community mesh network, email me at bwaldron (at) gmail [dott] com.) The tipping point for turning this into a viable civic hack seed project will be getting a team lead who (1) knows lots about community mesh networks or (2) is an effective project lead and is willing to learn enough about mesh networks to herd the technical and non-technical cats who want to be part of the project. Please raise your hand if you’re that cat herder!
Maybe we can get someone from EDS to help…
A community mesh network is a wireless community network that uses a mesh network design for connecting everyone who wants to be part of the network. There is plenty of information online and in the brains of people in NE Wisconsin about mesh networks, so we should be able to design a prototype system and test it fairly quickly. (...and then Murphy’s Law starts to kick in…)
A third possible germinator is WhereToGo (WTG), or something in the vicinity of that general concept. WTG is short for “What’s Happening & Where To Go Around Here.” This civic hack would have a mobile-first design, and could fall into the SoLoMo category (social, local, mobile) depending on the ambition level of the WTG team. The primary usage for WTG will probably be as a smartphone app, but it makes sense to use responsive design that enables laptop or desktop users to find out what’s going on in our area. The initial MVP (minimum viable product) would likely be just the local and mobile components. Incorporating social components would be more appropriately worked on after it’s been shown that the MVP is usable and is getting traction in beta testing with area residents.
In “10 Steve Jobs Secrets For A World-Class Civic Hackathon,” there are quite a few civic hack examples from other communities to leverage for WTG. If someone decides to begin working on a WTG-style civic hack, I’ll reach out to other communities and civic hackers to get more info on what they have done in this space. (If you’d like to lead this project, you can call the project or app anything you want. WTG is just the TLA I created to describe the concept.)
Below is my list of most probable candidates for civic hack seeds.
AppletonAPI / Is It Recycling Week? / CityDataAPI Repository
Community Mesh Network
Where To Go
Transportation Team: Transit info, GTFS, SMSMyBus, etc.
Crime Data: At least one civic hackathon participant worked on crime data; many cities have something related to crime; first civic hack was crime / map mashup
VIP / WeVote: Timely for November elections if civic hacking event held in October; some interest in voting hacks at June 6 hackathon; see previous posts
Open311 or some mashup of services and data sources to identify a city's top concerns
If you’re willing to be the lead person for any of the above civic hack projects other than AppletonAPI (Mike Putnam’s the project lead for that), please let me know so I can publicize that and let interested civic hackers know who to contact if they want to help. If you know of a different civic hack you’d like to launch as both a personal project and an opportunity for people looking to help work on someone else’s hack, I’d love to know about that, too.
FYI -- It appears someone in the city of Appleton decided the June 6 DHMN Civic Hackathon/Appleton 2015 was a worthwhile event. There is serious discussion about planning a second civic hackathon in Appleton. It would be good to have a few seed projects already sprouting when that hackathon is held.
I’m also hoping there will be strong interest in NE Wisconsin cities to host at least one other civic hackathon before the next Appleton event. Any of the above listed projects can easily be used as a seed civic hack for the host city of the next hackathon. Or you might be interested in a different project with strong ties or application for your home city.
Remember, our focus is on connecting and building the civic hacking community of NE Wisconsin.
What’s developed in one city will most likely be applicable to or easily customized for other cities in our region. So it doesn’t really matter if we build the initial version of a civic hack for Appleton, Oshkosh, Green Bay, De Pere, Fond du Lac, Sturgeon Bay, Marinette, Ripon, Kaukauna or any other city in NE Wisconsin. A community mesh network built first in Ripon could be copied or improved in Appleton, and vice versa.
Nietzsche said, “Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed. -- Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.”
[tl;dr -- You’re probably not safe when you’re on public Wi-Fi, you probably don’t realize how unsafe you are, and you don’t know how to change things so you can feel safe using public WiFi. The way to start changing this situation is to support a new NE Wisconsin cybersecurity initiative.]
Today’s post covers public Wi-Fi, a topic highly relevant to cybersecurity. (Note: Wi-Fi is the 'official' format for this term; many authoritative websites and documents just use WiFi.) Although I haven’t done a survey to document the statistics, my feeling is that most people in this region have a lower level of WiFi cybersecurity knowledge and protection than they should have. I think we should work together to change that situation.
The goal of this post is to help you understand that you’re probably not safe and secure when you’re on public WiFi. After I’ve made that clear, I’ll point out a couple ways you can become more secure.
If we establish this NE Wisconsin collaborative cybersecurity initiative, one result is that people will have a highly knowledgeable local resource they can afford to go to when they want to (1) fully understand public WiFi security and (2) know that they have the best cybersecurity system when using public WiFi. Civic hackers involved with the Cyber Defense Force will also be able to answer questions related to articles about WiFi security, such as the one quoted below. (The focus of this post if public WiFi, but many points in the post will also apply to WiFi in other places, such as your home or business.)
When you use your phone, tablet or laptop on public WiFi at the airport, hotel, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Denny's, Dunkin' Donuts, Panera or similar places, how secure are you?
Can knowledgeable computer geeks see what websites you’re looking at?
Can they read your email?
Can they see or capture your passwords?
Can they record information you use to buy something from Amazon?
Can they watch you transfer money in your bank account?
Can they put viruses, trojans, keyloggers and other malware on your device?
Here’s one story of Wi-Fi insecurity:
“From his vantage point at a coffeehouse, Brian Gragg gazed across the street at the darkened windows of a French provincial mansion. The lush River Oaks section of Houston’s Inner Loop had more than a few of these aging beauties, restored and pressed into service as quaint professional buildings. They sheltered doctors’ offices, architectural firms, law firms—and branch offices of east coast stockbrokers. It was this last species of suburban tenant that attracted Gragg...One of the brokers there had installed a wireless access point in his office but failed to change the default password and SSID. Better yet, the broker couldn’t be bothered to shut his machine off at night.
Gragg glanced down at his own laptop and adjusted a small Wi-Fi antenna to point more directly at the office windows. The broker’s computer screen was displayed as a window on Gragg’s laptop. Gragg had compromised the workstation days ago, first obtaining a network IP address from the router, and then gaining access to the broker’s machine through the most basic of NetBIOS assaults...In the past year Gragg had evolved beyond simple credit card scams. He no longer prowled bars passing out portable magstripe readers to waiters and busboys and paying a bounty for each credit card number.
Gragg now stole identities. His buddy, Heider, had schooled him on the intricacies of spear-phishing...Gragg was using the broker’s workstation to conduct an email campaign to the firm’s clientele. He had cribbed the phony marketing blather and graphics from the brokerage’s own web site, but what the email said was irrelevant. Gragg’s goal was that the phish merely view the message...When the user viewed the email, the OS ran a decompression algorithm to render the graphic onscreen; it was this decompression algorithm that executed Gragg’s malicious script and let him slip inside the user’s system—granting him full access. There was a patch available for the decompression flaw, but older, rich folks typically had no clue about security patches.
Gragg’s script also installed a key logger, which gave him account and password information to virtually everything the user did from then on...What sort of idiot hung the keys to his business out on the street...These people shouldn’t be left home alone, much less put in charge of people's’ investments...More than likely the scam wouldn’t be detected for months, and even then, the company probably wouldn’t tell their clients...”
Brian Gragg is a fictitious character in the novel “Daemon” by Daniel Suarez. It’s an excellent book. The WiFi story above is fictitious, but scenes similar to the one described are happening in real life.
“In his backpack, Wouter Slotboom, 34, carries around a small black device, slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, with an antenna on it. I meet Wouter by chance at a random café in the center of Amsterdam...Wouter removes his laptop from his backpack, puts the black device on the table, and hides it under a menu...Wouter switches on his laptop and device, launches some programs, and soon the screen starts to fill with green text lines.
It gradually becomes clear that Wouter’s device is connecting to the laptops, smartphones, and tablets of local cafe visitors. On his screen, phrases like “iPhone Joris” and “Simone’s MacBook” start to appear. The device’s antenna is intercepting the signals that are being sent from the laptops, smartphones, and tablets around us. We learn that Joris had previously visited McDonald’s, probably spent his vacation in Spain, and had been kart-racing. More text starts to appear on the screen. We are able to see which WiFi networks the devices were previously connected to...The waitress serves us our coffee and hands us the WiFi password. After Slotboom is connected, he is able to provide all the visitors with an internet connection and to redirect all internet traffic through his little device...My phone automatically connects itself to one of these networks, which all belong to the black device.
Slotboom’s device is capable of registering these searches and appearing as that trusted WiFi network. To demonstrate, I suddenly see the name of my home network appear on my iPhone’s list of available networks, as well as my workplace, and a list of cafes, hotel lobbies, trains, and other public places I’ve visited. My phone automatically connects itself to one of these networks, which all belong to the black device. Slotboom can also broadcast a fictitious network name, making users believe they are actually connecting to the network of the place they’re visiting. For example, if a place has a WiFi network consisting of random letters and numbers (Fritzbox xyz123), Slotboom is able to provide the network name (Starbucks). People, he says, are much more willing to connect to these...Already 20 smartphones and laptops are ours.
If he wanted to, Slotboom is now able to completely ruin the lives of the people connected: He can retrieve their passwords, steal their identity, and plunder their bank accounts...The idea that public WiFi networks are not secure is not exactly news. It is, however, news that can’t be repeated often enough. There are currently more than 1.43 billion smartphone users worldwide...In 2013, an estimated 206 million tablets and 180 million laptops were sold worldwide. Probably everyone with a portable device has once been connected to a public WiFi network: while having a coffee, on the train, or at a hotel...spend a day walking in the city with Wouter Slotboom, and you’ll find that almost everything and everyone connected to a WiFi network can be hacked...”
After reading the above public WiFi stories, I hope you feel like your public WiFi cybersecurity is not as good as it should be.
The goal of this post is not to give you detailed step-by-step instructions for making you secure on public WiFi, but below are 14 useful action steps you should take to improve your public WiFi cybersecurity. If you’re doing all the items listed below, you’re more secure than 99.9% of people in Wisconsin.
All computing device programs have the latest security updates via a secure network.
High-quality anti-malware system updated and active on your device.
Two-factor authentication used whenever possible.
VPN (virtual private network) used for connecting to public WiFi.
File sharing turned off on your devices and apps or programs.
Legitimate network name verified with WiFi provider before you connect to it.
WiFi connection marked on your device as a public network.
Firewall updated and active.
Only connect to HTTPS websites (Hypertext Transfer Protocol - Secure).
Verify all the apps on your device are secure.
Don’t enable automatic network connection and delete network from list when finished.
Turn off your device’s WiFi radio when you’re not using it.
Don’t use public WiFi for sensitive or financial transactions.
Consider using only a Chromebook or a Linux bootable live system for public WiFi.
Details about the above public WiFi security items can be found at tech media websites (CNET, lifehacker, Forbes), at Microsoft and AT&T websites, and at computer security company websites (Kaspersky, F-Secure, Norton). Googling for “public WiFi security” will find many more related websites. You can also search for other specific questions related to public WiFi cybersecurity.
If you read this far, you’re probably at least somewhat concerned that your public WiFi cybersecurity is not as good as it should be. You’ve also read 14 tips for improving the security of your public WiFi use. So that problem’s taken care of, right?
NO, it's not taken care of.
The overall public WiFi cybersecurity of NE Wisconsin residents and businesses is probably no better now than it was before you read this post. Why do I say this?
Most people in NE Wisconsin didn’t read this post.
Most people who read this post won’t do some or any of the steps listed above. They’ve probably read similar information in the past about WiFi security and didn’t take all the actions they should have after reading about public WiFi cybersecurity problems.
Many of the people who read the post and want to do all the steps don’t have the tech knowledge, experience or confidence to implement the above steps.
The above information presents some conflicts about how you can truly be secure on public WiFi, such as ‘which VPN should I use and does it really make me safe.’
The above steps don’t cover all the tech aspects of public WiFi cybersecurity. Even if they did cover everything as of June 22, 2015, within a week or a month or a year, there will be new problems or solutions created relevant to public WiFi that you won’t be aware of, won’t understand, or won’t react to as needed to adjust your public WiFi cybersecurity system.
The only way you can be confident you’re securely using public WiFi is by having a trusted, reasonably priced, highly knowledgeable cybersecurity resource in NE Wisconsin that will (1) help you understand what your personal or organizational cybersecurity needs are, (2) help you figure out and put in place the lowest cost public WiFi cybersecurity system appropriate for your needs, and (3) help you develop and put a plan in place to keep your cybersecurity system updated to meet your needs in the future.
If you already have a NE Wisconsin cybersecurity resource like that, you’re one of the few people in the region who does. Please share that resource with me and with others you know.
If you don’t have an excellent NE Wisconsin cybersecurity resource like I described above and you want to have one, please read “Cybersecurity: A New Horizon For Civic Hacking?” then do these two action steps:
Support the launch of the proposed collaborative NE Wisconsin cybersecurity initiative as presented in the blog post listed immediately above and as shown below.
Contact your friends and influential people you know, and urge them to support the launch of this cybersecurity initiative.
I propose one or several NE Wisconsin colleges launch a collaborative regional cybersecurity pilot initiative. Civic hackers known as the Northeast Wisconsin Cyber Defense Force (NEW CDF), in collaboration with a new college cybersecurity program, help area residents and businesses maintain the best possible computer security and personal privacy. NEW CDF is a cadre of ethical and knowledgeable technologists working together to improve and practice their cybersecurity knowledge and skills. CDF provides practical training for business and personal computer security at the CDF Cybersecurity Training Center or onsite at northeast Wisconsin businesses and organizations. This community of cybersecurity civic hackers also helps catalyze and spin off cybersecurity startups and other high tech businesses.
As stated above, the main value of this blog post will be if it prompts you to support, and to urge other people to support, the launch of a collaborative regional cybersecurity initiative. If we do not develop this type of a local cybersecurity resource, our collective NE Wisconsin cybersecurity will remain pretty much where it is right now:
Widespread concern about inadequate cybersecurity.
Poor to almost-acceptable personal and organizational cybersecurity.
No reason to expect significant cybersecurity improvement in the next few years.
If you want to know more about how the collaborative regional cybersecurity initiative will create a trusted, reasonably priced, highly knowledgeable cybersecurity resource in NE Wisconsin, contact me or watch for future blog posts on this topic. If you had already done all 14 of the cybersecurity measure listed above before you read this post, please contact Bob Waldron at bwaldron [at] gmail (dott) com. I’d love to meet with you and have your input or involvement in creating a collaborative regional cybersecurity system.
Short Situation Summary -- In April 2015, Alex Stamos, the cybersecurity chief for Yahoo, stated his concern for how unprotected the average digital citizen is. “I’m not very happy with where we are as an industry,” he said, with a grim look on his face. “We’re really focusing on the 1%,” he added, referring to the small number of companies that can afford to spend on cybersecurity teams and products, and the minority of internet users who are literate enough to jump through the hoops that are needed to be safer online...“The vast majority of people are not safe using the internet everyday,” Stamos tells me..."
Madison, Wisconsin, has a TIME community event (Tech, Innovators, Makers, Entrepreneurs) called the Forward Festival.
The Forward Festival is an 8-day celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship, August 20 - 27, 2015, for "entrepreneurs, nerds, designers, geeks, hackers, foodies, and creative professionals from the Midwest."
One of the cool things about this TIME community event is that it’s so nuanced that its audience includes geeks, nerds AND hackers…
My memory could easily be wrong on this, but it seems like the primary formally-organized civic hacking event in Madison (National Day of Civic Hacking) was subsumed by the Forward Festival. As was, to a large extent, BarCampMadison, a fantastic two-day unconference I helped get started and participated in several times. The Madison de-emphasis on its formal civic hacking event and its annual technology unconference is probably due largely to the creation of a week-long
event which has many components designed to appeal to the same people who might get involved with civic hacking or with barcamps.
Competition For Attention In A Limited Market: When there is a plethora of tech events scheduled in an 8-day period in a metro area with a limited potential audience, that can have the effect of diluting the appeal or drawing power of one of the festival component events compared to when it's a stand-alone event. To some degree, those multiple tech events are competing for the same potential participants, even when the events are at different times or on different days during the festival. Tech overload or burnout can reduce the number of event participants compared to the number who would attend a stand-alone event.
If the Forward Festival took place in San Francisco or New York City instead of in Madison, it would be much easier to attract plenty of attendees or participants for each of the individual events in the festival. Because of the huge populations in those major metro areas, there are very large potential audiences for each festival component, so those components are much less likely to suffer due to attention competition.
Free As In Beer: Cost is another factor. Most civic hacking and barcamp participant-driven events have free registration for the participants. Creating a complex festival of multiple events like the Forward Festival requires a lot of coordination, creates competition for resources, sponsors and audiences, might involve paid speakers, workers and entertainment (Forward Festival included musicians and circus performers), and, consequently, will usually require more marketing expenses. These factors increase the cost to organize, put on and clean up after an 8-day festival, which means the festival events are unlikely to be free for people who go to them. I don’t know if the Forward Festival is a for-profit venture, or if they're a non-profit whose financial goal is to do better than break-even. The bottom line is that you’ll probably have to pay more than two bucks to go to the Forward Festival.
Attendance-Driven Focus: A prime factor that attracts me to civic hacking, barcamps and unconference-style events is that they’re participant-driven, not attendance-driven. A barcamp can be considered a resounding success even if there are only 25 people who show up. An attendance-driven event organized by a company, a government organization, or an event coordinator who is not a participant in the event is likely to be considered a failure if only 25 people show up. There is much more personal engagement at participant-driven events. Participants are responsible for making the event a success. A big reason for participating in unconferences is to meet like-minded people and interesting ‘doers’ who are making the world a cooler place. That level of personal engagement is missing in most attendance-focused events.
If I lived in or close to Madison, and if the cost to participate in all the events of interest to me was free or very low, I’d likely go to ten or fifteen of the Forward Festival events.
However, I don’t live in Madison. It’s a four-hour round trip, so it would be challenging for me to be involved with all the Forward Festival events that might otherwise participate in if they were on separate weekends, had more participants because of fewer competing events, were free or very low cost, and were more focused on participation than attendance.
From a NE Wisconsin civic hacking standpoint, I have four comments to share with respects to various aspects of the Forward Festival:
If civic hacking events are combined with or compete with other events that appeal to the same audience, it will likely significantly reduce participation in the civic hacking events. That’s the inevitable result of the limited population, culture and demographics of NE Wisconsin.
If civic hacking events have a participation fee, it will likely reduce participation.
Having civic hacking events be primarily participant-driven, rather than attendance-driven, will get more of the ‘right’ people involved, will build more relationships and a stronger civic hacking community, and will bring more benefits to the cities and counties of NE Wisconsin.
If Madison had an annual civic hacking event, I’d participate in it. If Madison had a stand-alone barcamp, I’d participate in that, too. But I think those stand-alone events disappeared partly because of the Forward Festival.
*****
[Don’t take this post the wrong way -- I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to the Forward Festival. It has some cool stuff going on. And it absolutely gets more media attention, generates a much larger attendance headcount and brings more revenue to Madison area businesses than would a series of separate participant-driven events. Click here to check out their website. The Forward Festival is just not a TIME community event (Tech, Innovators, Makers, Entrepreneurs) that this resident of NE Wisconsin is likely to take advantage of. But it might be the kind of thing you want to go to Madison to check out.]
This June 20, 2015, post is five items from recent news about civic hacking. If they sound like something you want to know more about, click the headline links and read them in their entirety.
“Politics are heavily influenced by money belonging to the billionaires and insiders who make up about .05 percent of the American public. And in some cases, a candidate’s chance of success depends on playing the game by their rules...a recent New York Times/CBS Poll shows that four out of five Americans believe money has too much influence over political campaigns. But civic tech can be a great tool to empower greater equity in politics as we know it. My name is Andy Curran, and I am the founder of a new civic tech project called the WeVoteProject.org. WeVote is...able to build a new kind of social network — one that is entirely focused on building a bridge between the public and their elected representatives on the state level. This bridge provides both citizens and elected officials with total legislative transparency as well as the communication tools of a social network. On top of this functionality, we have added one very important caveat: In order to contribute to the body of knowledge on WeVote, a citizen user must validate their status as a real registered voter.”
WeVote currently has a funding campaign on Kickstarter (only asking for $25,000 and about a month to go as of June 20). Click here to see it on Kickstarter and consider pledging to the campaign. WeVote is an attempt to give elected officials a balanced view of what their constituent registered voters opinions are on issues and legislation by giving those voters a new way to be heard.
“...the Canadian government, International Development Research Centre, World Bank and the Open Data for Development Network hosted almost 2,000 people for the 3rd International Open Data Conference (IODC) in Ottawa...We are often asked to identify what the impact of government data is on improving the lives of ordinary citizens — and this question certainly came up a thousand times during IODC as well. On Friday morning, for instance, during the main plenary, everyone seemed to be in agreement that the purpose of releasing government data is to ultimately benefit the user — usually the citizen...an audience member poignantly stood up and asked: “So, why are there no users on this panel?”...Worse, sometimes these divisions don’t only exist between those who create the tools and the audience they’re trying to target, but also within the community itself...Civic hackers and policy advocates sometimes aren’t in the same conversations and there seem to be very few initiatives that attempt to marry the interests of policy and tech...The increased growth of the international open data conference from a hundred people gathering...three years ago to a week-long conference with almost 2,000 people is evidence of this. However, we still haven’t gotten to the core of how we can use data to shake unjust power structures and make governments more effective and accountable...”
This article illustrates two points; (1) The concept of open data from governments is an emerging, but fast growing trend, and (2) It will be hard, but necessary, to effectively define and communicate the value and impact of open data from our governments.
“Every day, city residents navigate a maze of systems to complete basic tasks like accessing government services or paying traffic tickets. These tasks, inconvenient for everyone, can be so numerous, burdensome and time-consuming for lower-income people that they can amount to a job unto themselves...recent events in Baltimore and around the country highlight how, at their worst, these systems contribute to, compound, and undergird pervasive inequities that have destructive and devastating consequences in people’s lives….Urban Institute, through its National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, supports a community-driven movement to generate, open and use the explosion of data in cities to support evidence-based policy. Civically minded technologists, organized through the Code for America volunteer Brigade, have developed groundbreaking tools that make working with government simpler, and have inspired millions to reimagine a government for and by the people in the 21st century. And a growing movement to reinvent local government from the inside and out has found support from Living Cities and a growing corpus of allies...”
The Civic Tech and Data Collaborative is focused on Boston and St. Louis, but as with most civic hacks, cities in NE Wisconsin should be able to benefit from the ideas developed elsewhere.
“June 6 was the National Day of Civic Hacking, a nationwide initiative that encourages anyone to build solutions for their communities...Here, Technical.ly takes a look at who created what throughout the country...California’s Health Data Code-A-Thon in Sacramento: Using data from the California Health and Human Services Agency’s Open Data Portal, 15 groups presented projects to help consumers and policymakers make more informed decisions about health at personal and community scales...In Chicago, hackers convened to overcome legal obstacles. Organized by the Chicago Legal Innovation Group, openlegal and the Michigan State University College of Law, more than 30 participants developed 13 projects to solve eight challenges posed by legal organizations...Open Pittsburgh’s #hackforchange: In collaboration with Maptime Pittsburgh, this six-month-old Code for America brigade got around 30 people together to explore the possibilities of data and digital mapping...Matt Bjornson pulled together Minnesota’s Hack for Change. Around 45 people showed up to brainstorm projects focused on the Minneapolis homeless population, metro mobility and accessibility, crime and disciplinary data trends in high school students….While many NDOCH events spanned the weekend, the hard workers at Code for KC went above and beyond. They’re still developing tools — until November. The end date ensures the projects will actually get done. Code for KC will continue to support each team, and in July, participants will reconvene to see each other’s progress...Perhaps one of the biggest NDOCH events, Hack for L.A. also sought out to solve some of the state’s biggest issues. Challenges included ways to solve water issues, directing new immigrants toward resources and addressing health issues such as encouraging active transportation, childhood obesity and asthma...Fishackathon: An event in its own right, GreenWave and the U.S. Department of State teamed up to host Fishackathons in 12 cities across the world, including Jakarta, Indonesia, Santiago, Chile and Toronto...”
This post has lots of good ideas to inspire civic hackers in our region. Maybe inspiring enough to get forty or fifty more people in NE Wisconsin to try their hand at civic hacking...
“Aimed to connect and engage citizens with government and demonstrate how mobile technologies can lead to the next generation of tech jobs and investment, the 2015 AT&T Tech Valley Civic App Challenge was a partnership between AT&T and area universities, businesses and technology organizations...The winners of the two-month “virtual hackathon” were chosen from more than 25 entries and more than 120 participants. Six were chosen based on the apps’ potential impact on Tech Valley, execution and creativity or novelty. Cash prizes totaled more than $18,000. The grand prize of $10,000 went to Food Pantry Helper...This mobile web app assists non-for-profit food pantries in managing their operations more efficiently and cost effectively to better serve the community’s most needy. It includes services such as client, inventory, grant, volunteer and donor tracking. In addition, the app reduces the need for paper, provides real-time data and reporting to management and compliance oversight entities, and provides an overall structure for a food pantry operation...Second place went to an app called Electorate...a social voting app...The third place prize was presented to Snapmap...a mobile web app that helps New York state families get the most out of their SNAP benefits, the USDA’s supplemental nutrition assistance program designed to ensure that all Americans, regardless of income level, can purchase and consume healthy food on a regular basis...”
It would be interesting to see how many hackathon participants we’d get in this region if we had a civic hack challenge with some type of prize. It would be nice to have a couple cash prizes for hacks that were worked on for the two months prior to the date of the hackathon, but I don't recommend cash prizes for one-day hacks developed on the day of the event. There should also be some kind of non-cash prizes for work done between the start and the end of the hackathon, with those prizes and competition rules designed to promote collaboration, rather than focus on who wrote the most code or generated the most ‘Likes’ on their social media campaign to promote the hack.
I'll reach out to AT&T to discuss the possibility of them sponsoring a civic hack competition in NE Wisconsin. Will keep you updated on that...
If you read much about civic hacking, you’ll often see libraries mentioned. After all, what civic organization is more likely to be interested in information, data and knowledge than a library?
I know the librarian (library person?) who founded one of the first participant-driven tech events in NE Wisconsin, a tech unconferencecalled BarCampFDL. Many of the participants in the first BarCampFDL were also library people. Birds of a feather and all that… Anyway, because of the natural connection between libraries and civic hacking, it seemed like he or one of his library compatriots might be interested in helping organize a civic hackathon with a major focus on libraries. He was open to the concept, and we’ll discuss it more over the next month or two.
With that thought in mind, I decided to write a blog post to explore this topic and get a few ideas on how we could incorporate a library theme into a civic hackathon. Below are ten items showing various aspects of the connection between civic hackers and libraries.
(1) Trusted Institutions
Libraries are trusted institution in our communities, often well-connected with a civic leaders, city officials and people likely to be engaged with improving their city. That's one reason the library is a natural fit to participate in the civic hacking movement, helping bring legitimacy and credibility to the topic and minimizing concerns about ‘hacking’ being something to avoid or prevent. A potentially-concerned Joe Public or Cathy Councilperson is less likely to object to a local civic hackathon if the library is a sponsor or partner for the event.
(2) A Natural Fit
One of the missions for libraries is to be an information resource for community. This means that most community activities related to knowledge, information and data are a good fit for being led by a library, being hosted at the library or involving the library in some way. Civic hacking is also a natural fit for many librarians who enjoy working with information and are often champions for open data. They also tend to be good at figuring out ways to store, manage and find information, all of which are useful skills for civic hackers.
(3) Hackathon Hosts
Libraries in numerous cities have hosted civic hackathons. There’s even a guide for helping organize a GLAM hackathon (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums). Here’s a sampling of those events and cities:
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) participated in the NDoCH in 2013 and 2014. If there are other national organizations with data relevant to libraries, they’d likely be interested in some type of collaboration with civic hackers.
(6) Inform The Community
Univ of Pennsylvania hosted a panel discussion about civic hacking. This type of event can be used to raise community awareness about civic hacking, to inform area residents about what other people are doing to engage with their governments and take personal responsibility for solving local problems. Widespread knowledge of how other cities are being improved by civic hackers can lead to residents of your community wanting to do the same thing!
(7) Supplement Current Classes
Many library ‘learning opportunities’ are complementary to civic hacking, i.e. computer classes or other community tech classes or workshops. If the library doesn’t already offer learning activities relevant to civic hacking, they could easily incorporate that type of community education into their existing programs.
(8) Leveraging Emerging Technology
Libraries sometimes have limited budgets and limited number of employees whose responsibility and skills are taking advantage of emerging technology. Tech-savvy people can offer help to fill this gap. Non-tech people can work on aspects of civic hacks that don't require ninja coder skills (see "What Are Some Non-coder Activities In Civic Hacking?"). Volunteer civic hackers may be able to provide much-appreciated assistance which would not otherwise be available to the library.
(9) Makerspace & DIY Connections
Having libraries involved with civic hacking is totally congruent with the movement to incorporate makerspaces into libraries. The Fond du Lac library is developing a makerspace; many other libraries have or are considering one. Civic hacking can be thought of as DIY government improvement and assistance. Makerspaces are DIY product design and personal manufacturing centers. Learn more about the library--makerspace connection, check out this University of Michigan-inspired website or this guide from the Open Education Database.
(10) Participant-Driven History
Libraries have long been connected with participant-driven activities, from the Junto to LibraryCamps. Civic hacking is, to a large extent, most successful when it's a participant-driven activity. The basic concept is not that cities or other governments are organizing events and projects which will generate free labor for their needs. Rather than being managed and passively follow top-down directives, civic hackers want to take action on stuff they think needs improving. People participating in these activities feel empowered and responsible for creating change and improvement, just like Benjamin Franklin and his friends did.
In 1727, Benjamin Franklin, then 21, created the Junto, a group of "like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community."...Reading was a great pastime of the Junto, but books were rare and expensive. The members created a library, initially assembled from their own books. This did not suffice, however. Franklin conceived the idea of a subscription library, which would pool the funds of the members to buy books for all to read.
LibraryCamp is an unconference for people who want to improve libraries.
The first Library Camp was held at the Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan in April 2006 as an "unconference" to talk about opportunities and challenges regarding Library 2.0. It was organized by John Blyberg, and went over so well a Library Camp East was held in September 2006 at the Darien Public Library (CT) with about 50 attendees (organized by Alan Gray). Australia had its first library unconference on March 2, 2007, in Melbourne. Library Camp NYC was held on August 14, 2007.
If you want to know more about libraries and civic hacking, ‘check out’ the links sprinkled above throughout the post, ask your favorite librarian for help finding information on the topic, or participate in the probably-upcoming NE Wisconsin civic hackathon for which libraries are a major theme.
If you want to help organize this type of a civic hacking activity, formal or informal, email me at bwaldron [at] gmail (dott) com.
[tl;dr -- ten great ideas Steve Jobs would have stolen from 2015 civic hackathons]
Ideas Steve Jobs stole from Xerox PARC?
Good civic hackers copy. Great civic hackers steal.
You say, “Whoa...stop giving civic hacking a bad name!” Some people already think civic hackers should be incarcerated...
No, we're not stealing money. We're not stealing personal identities or private information. We're not stealing intellectual property, corporate secrets or confidential government information.
For the theme of today's post, this civic hacker is ‘stealing’ from Apple’s ex-CEO, Steve Jobs, and the poet T. S. Elliot. It's ok, because I obtained a Reasonable Reuse Literary License to remix and recycle their words. The Quote Investigator says:
“The multi-part PBS television program “Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires” premiered in 1996. During the program Steve Jobs again mentioned the saying that he attributed to Pablo Picasso…”Picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn…”
The point of this introduction is that civic hackers learn from each other, and the open ideas and open source code developed in one city are often ‘stolen’ and made into something better in a different city.
In my earlier post, “Bolder, Brighter, Better: The Next NE Wisc Civic Hackathon,” I listed a number of areas in which the next civic hackathon held in our region can become better, based on my experience with our June 6 hackathon this year. Below are ten ideas Steve Jobs might have recommended stealing from what other civic hackers did around the country on National Day of Civic Hacking (NDoCH) 2015. If we steal any of these ideas, we owe it to ourselves and to the source hackers to make them into something uniquely better than what we stole.
#1 Mentors For Civic Hacking Tech Basics
“Dean Ellen Suni and professors Michael Robak, Jim DeLisle and Tony Luppino have shown an impressively innovative mindset in teaching their students how to use techie tools like Github and Balsamiq and to harness open data sets to create apps for industries like law, government and real estate. They also showed fortitude in spades, hunkering down with the students for large portions of the 16-hour hack.”
Steal this way: Recruit at least one faculty member from five or more of the nine NE Wisconsin colleges to lead a Civic Hacking Tech Basics session at the next hackathon. Christian Long did some sharing of Python tips, techniques and tricks at the DHMN Civic Hackathon/Appleton 2015. Ross Larson, Mike Putnam and others provided introductions to GitHub and Slack to those unfamiliar with the services. Let’s learn from what Kansas City did and improve it with a NE Wisconsin twist. By helping hackathon participants learn new tech skills, more and better civic hacks will be created.
#2 Civic Hacking Cross-Pollination
“Code for Hillsborough participants got a firsthand look at some real community needs and issues, and local government met a hundred area technologists, programmers and developers ready, willing and eager to share their skills and abilities for the good of all.”
Great civic hackers enhance a theft thusly: Two months ahead of the hackathon, run a campaign to identify top 10 community needs, issues and problems. For each of the ten needs, recruit a city / county person and a non-city / county person involved in the problem and knowledgeable about it, and have them explain the need / issue / problem at the start of the hackathon. In addition, recruit at least 20 city and county employees who might benefit from or contribute to civic hacks to participate in the hackathon during a short cross-pollination session. For 30 to 60 minutes in the early part of the hackathon, have small group sessions where those city / county employees meet the other hackathon participants and discuss citizen and government viewpoints and ideas related to civic hacking.
#3 With A Little Help From My Friends
“Crucial to the weekend’s success was pulling together teams in the months leading up to the event. KC Digital Drive worked with Code for KC Captain Paul Barham to recruit and meet with team leaders representing community organizations who could use some hacking help.”
NE Wisconsin pirates purloin plenty: Captain Paul Barham will likely be glad to assist us in being most effective at working with community organizations. If he spent months on this subject, we can learn much from him. We should also contact two or three other Code for America brigades who have worked effectively with community organizations to build civic hacks useful to them. To top off this purloining, part of our team working on this should spend their time documenting the interaction between hackers and the community organizations so others can easily learn from our experience. Just remember, 'the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules'...
#4 Recruit Catalytic Civic Hackers
“Hack Michiana...drew the attention of one the U.S.'s top tech experts. His visit was finalized last minute, but D.J. Patil, chief data scientist at the White House in the Office of Science and Technology, made Hack Michiana his first stop among a few others scheduled in Chicago. South Bend's...Santiago Graces, the city’s chief innovation officer said...Although Michiana may not be the first place thought of when thinking of tech-cultured cities...South Bend is doing things not seen in cities the same size. The innovations in South Bend and the surrounding area are catching up to cities such as Chicago, Boston and even San Francisco..."We are smaller, but remarkable in our desire to become a better city," Graces said. "There are bigger things happening in South Bend than people realize." It's those "bigger things" being pursued that caught the attention of Patil.”
Learn how to lift from the legends: If you want to learn a new skill or improve an existing skill, you don’t learn from someone at the same level as you, or slightly better. You learn from an expert, from a ninja coder, from a guru. We want to become better hackers. Ergo, we will recruit as teachers, mentors and event participants other civic hackers who are highly skilled and very knowledgeable. Over the next few months we’ll research who those ninjas are, we’ll identify projects and situations deserving of their time and interest, and we’ll reach out to them. If we get guidance from four or five domain leaders, they’ll be the catalyst for a laudable leap to the next level of civic hacking in our region.
[Note: A necessary step before getting catalytic civic hackers involved with a regional civic hacking community is to first connect those regional civic hackers. Connecting the regional community first does two things. One, it makes sure there are students to learn from the masters. Two, a connected community is much more likely to initiate projects worthy of the ninja civic hackers' involvement than would an unconnected community.]
#5 Where To Go (WTG, a.k.a. What’s Happening & Where To Go Around Here)
“Orlando Events: A web tool that would scrape both local websites (City of Orlando, Amway Center) and nationwide platforms (Ticketmaster, Eventbrite) to gather data on all events taken place with the goal to make it accessible in a single API.”
“WikiKC is available to the public for updates as well as a source of information. A central location for Kansas Citians to tell about the great lunch they enjoyed in Brookside, or tell how exciting the Kansas City Kite Festival will be this year (don’t forget your chairs!).”
"A second honorable mention went to Eventy...The iPhone app locates community events near the user, informing them where and when the events are and can even assist with directions. The app scans the web to find hyper-local events and makes them easily viewable to attract more visitors for events happening at nearby community centers, businesses, museums, and more, and lists them in one convenient location for the user to find a variety of event opportunities in the Tech Valley."
Masterful civic hacker heist: This opportunity doesn’t just build on a hack that one community rolled out. It builds on five hacks (and maybe more…) that multiple communities worked on. At the June 6 civic hackathon in Appleton, Kim, Karen, David and other participants discussed the need for a better way to find out what’s happening in NE Wisconsin communities. A highly-interested coder or project leader might consider taking responsibility for WTG, then lead a pre-hackathon design session with other people interested in the project. Depending on who works on WTG, this could be either open source or a for-profit proprietary product. Even if the source code for WTG is open, it can still be packaged and sold in the Google and Apple app stores as long as the terms of the open source code license are adhered to.
#6 Many Civic Hackers Make Light Work
“This week, volunteers worked to build these cubes full of LED lights... 52,000 of them! They are heading to the front windows of ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center. Each light can be programmed individually, which means educators can use them to visualize scientific concepts that might be hard to understand. "What we're going to be doing over the summer is bringing lake science data around blue green algae, or waves and weather, that kind of thing and building really interesting narratives to help tell those stories in a way that are really easy to relate to and entertaining," says project manager Rachel Hooper. They started working on this project in March. It's funded by a Google Grant. They want input from artists, educators, programmers on how to best convey those big-data pictures.”
A sweet second-story sting: This Vermont water ecosystem LED visualization to inspire people to take action on improving the local environment is my favorite civic hack story from NDoCH 2015. I love microcontrollers and LEDs. It will be challenging to come up with ways to make our open data LED visualization hack better than the one Burlington is doing with Google’s sponsorship. But we can certainly make it different, customize it for NE Wisconsin open data, and figure out a couple unique features, capabilities or applications for our open data LED project. Maybe there’s a logical connection with the Light Up The Fox project.
#7 Transportation Tricks
“Road Closure Web Form: The web tool will allow Orlando city employees to enter road closure information and convert it into an open data source in order to allow multiple platforms to utilize the open data source and allow information to citizens.”
Politely pinch and pilfer: With all the road construction happening in Green Bay, Appleton, Neenah and pretty much every other city in our region, it would be nice to have a mobile app that helps us avoid, get around or at least be aware of road closures or major traffic issues. The full-blown polished-UX (user experience) app is unlikely to spring smooth and shiny from the next NE Wisconsin civic hackathon, but we could get a good start on this project if there’s interest in it. We’ll improve on the Orlando hackers by forming a regional transportation civic hacking sub-group for people who want to work on GIS data for buses, real-time GPS location for public transit, road closures and delays, etc. We’ll start now to get involvement of city, county and state road and highway crews and departments. And we’ll start a publicity and marketing campaign to recruit more coders and roaders to this group of transportation civic hackers.
#8 Community And Regional Economic Development
“Parcel Assessment Tool – A GIS-based zoning app that gives a potential builder data regarding a specific parcel of land, such as current land use, zoning rules, the size, what options may be available for that piece of land, all the way down to the required square footage and parking with that project. This project will benefit individuals and organizations interested in property management and development.”
Snidely Whiplash land baron caper: One way to improve your community is to help boost the local or regional economy. And I don’t mean ‘boost’ as in what a pickpocket does. The Kansas City Koders created a tool to help builders and developers in their area quickly find information they need for specific land parcels. I don’t know diddly about land development, so I can’t explain how to improve on what KC hackers did, but we can get Jon Bartz, Karen Harkness and other economic development people who are knowledgeable about this topic to help design an improved version of the Parcel Assessment Tool (PAT). Or they can suggest a different hack which the PAT inspires or complements.
#9 Hackers Steal Magnolias -- Trees, Trees And More Trees
“The NYC Department of Parks & Recreation used open data to deploy a swarm of green-vest clad volunteers, each with a map of their assigned city block. Over 2,700 people covered 2,649 blocks and counted 14,693 trees. Thought those numbers are impressive, the job is only 2.1 percent complete. Tree huggers, learn more about NYC’s TreesCount! 2015 and how you can help count the urban forest.”
“Storefront Street Tree Initiative – A public facing page was created with an app behind it on MEAN stack. The goal is to help those who want to add trees to city streets. Southwest Blvd has been the pilot. The first pain point was a lack of trust; user experience and functionality has been delayed as surprising complex issues were discovered.”
“Louisville Tree Canopy assessment mapping across the county -- The city of Louisville’s Sustainability Office commissioned a tree canopy study from Davey Resource Group and created a detailed report of the results. Louisville needs more trees to combat its urban heat island problem, which shows our city having the fastest growing problem in the nation. The city took that study’s information and created a tree canopy online map, but the CDA wanted to look at the data in a different way, showing it more granularly (by property parcel at higher zoom levels), adding interactivity, and also merging property taxes.”
A daring dendrology dodge: Appleton is, or was at one time, a Tree City USA. So it seems fitting that civic hackers work to reinforce or regain that badge of pride for Appleton, or at least figure out a project to enhance the tree-ability of cities in NE Wisconsin. This is another project where I don’t have specific recommendations on how to enhance the work done in other cities, but if we get a project lead for this, we might (1) start out with a NYC-style TreesCount, (2) maybe incorporate appropriate features of the Urban Forest Map talked about in “Part 2 Citizen Science + Civic Hacking: Fifteen Projects” and the Minneapolis Adopt-A-Tree hack mentioned in “Adopt-A-Hydrant: Civic Hack For Appleton,” (3) recruit team members from the Public Works Department or whoever handles tree issues in the city which the project focuses on first, and (4) get support from the Arbor Day Foundation. When I lived in northern California last year, I regularly worked on a trail crew in a redwood community forest. NE Wisconsin civic hackers might want to start a similar Volunteer Trails Stewards program. Maybe we can even get support from the Humboldt State University 'Marching Lumberhacks'for a Steal Magnolias project.
#10 I Was Hungry, You Fed Me
"The grand prize of $10,000 went to Food Pantry Helper, created by Russell Kirkwood of Stillwater. This mobile web app assists non-for-profit food pantries in managing their operations more efficiently and cost effectively to better serve the community’s most needy. It includes services such as client, inventory, grant, volunteer and donor tracking. In addition, the app reduces the need for paper, provides real-time data and reporting to management and compliance oversight entities, and provides an overall structure for a food pantry operation."
Snitch this idea to prevent Jean Valjean's dilemma: There are many food pantries and food programs for those who need a helping hand in NE Wisconsin. Each pantry and program has its own system for providing the best service possible, although funding or tech skill limitations may mean those systems are antiquated, clunky or challenging to use, or they may provide less-than-optimum service. If our area's civic hackers develop a food assistance open source project, that doesn't mean every pantry and food program in the region would have to use it. It would just mean they'd have a free standardized-but-customizable option to consider, with some amount of local tech talent to help them learn the system. This is another one of those perfect-for-civic-hacking opportunities.
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Stealing even one of the above ten ideas from other civic hackers and welding it into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from the civic hack from which it was torn, would make for a most excellent civic hacking event.
Let me know if you find even better ideas to appropriate for the next NE Wisconsin civic hackathon.
...wait a minute, there is just one more thing...
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That 'one more thing' is these honorable mentions that didn’t make it into the Steve Jobs Top 10:
“CityGram Orlando (formerly Simplicty) : CityGram Orlando will be an open source app that allows citizens to gain instant access to relevant information in and around their neighborhood by inputting a street address. The initial data will include waste pickup, nearby landmarks and historic sites, and police dispatch data. Citizens will have the option of receiving email or text notification when new information is made available.”
Some NE Wisconsin civic hacker(s) might want to use the AppletonAPI, or a similar API for other cities in our region, to build a hack better than CityGram Orlando.
*****
“While the weekend is geared more toward fostering collaboration rather than competition, Balani mentioned some fun prizes that might be awarded at the end of the event, such as being taken out for ice cream by Princeton's Mayor, Liz Lempert.”
One or several mayors in NE Wisconsin could collaborate on a fun prize at the end of the next civic hackathon, like the Princeton, NJ, mayor did.
*****
“Children will also participate in the day’s event to test whatever application the teams come up with.”
If we can be sure we’ll have at least one app that Jolene or Joe Citizen can install on their smartphone and test, we absolutely should recruit people, including children, to test the civic hack app(s). If a usable app is ready before the hackathon, users should test the app at the beginning of the event to identify UX improvements and bugs to fix during the event. We will also line up area citizens to do app testing toward the end of the event, after improvements have been made and new apps have been built. It would be really cool to have a couple Android apps and a couple iOS apps for people to test, but even two people testing one app would be worthwhile user validation.
