Across the United States on the weekend of June 1-2, coders, software developers, entrepreneurs, and citizens of all kinds worked together to try to improve our societies through the National Civic Day of Hacking. Using open data and technology, teams collaborated to create software solutions aimed at solving our civic challenges.
The Hack For LA! Open Data Hackathon for Social Good Brings Developers Together to Reach New (Boyle) Heights!!
Esri directly supported events in Denver, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. Here’s a recap of the Los Angeles activity!
HackForLA!
HackForLA! attracted more than 400 people, including 200 developers, to the Boyle Heights Youth Technology Center east of Los Angeles to make things better in Boyle Heights!
The City of LA worked with us to create an awesome ArcGIS Online data portal of interesting datasets for hackers to use. The coders buzzed around the center, talking of L.A. and opening its data at the ArcGIS Online site all weekend. They couldn’t wait to get started building apps!
Best Overall Hack for LA! Apps
HackForLA! event challenged developers to use technology and public data to innovate solutions to neighborhood and local challenges. Developers built apps ranging from emergency notification systems to pollution monitoring apps to communication platforms. Check out the full submission gallery here!
1st Prize – HackForJobs
This mobile app allows users to upload resumes. The app’s unique algorithm determines keywords and compares them to keywords posted for available jobs near users. When users approach the location matching the skillsets of their resume, the app notifies users with a push notification.
2nd Prize – Urbanfruit.ly
This website and app establishes a peer-to-peer network of urban gardeners. Through the app, users can post a harvest and work with other users to arrange exchanges.
3rd Prize – Boyle Heights Connect
This website presents an easy-to-use interface to make it easier for citizens in Boyle Heights to communicate with schools, government officials, and health care providers in the community. Users can set up accounts, and then arrange times to talk or make appointments.
Winner of the Esri Award
Forty teams coded and hacked their way through the event, many using Esri technology. Let’s check out the results!
Beautify LA took first place for best use of Esri technology! The team told the crowd, “Think Kickstarter meets Farmville!” This app allows citizens to create projects in the app denoting locations around the city where they’d like to see landscaping projects. Citizens can also browse through projects that others have created and help fund those projects if they wish. This app would be crowdsourced beautification! The people let community leaders know where they want nicer, greener spaces, and can directly contribute to the funding of the projects they want in their communities.
The app lets users login and create projects, such as tree planting in an abandoned parking lot or a community garden in an unused plot. They can also look at other projects and donate money to move it towards completion.
The team presented their app, wowing the Hackathon crowd with Esri basemaps in action. Esri maps serve as the location context to allow citizens to engage in landscaping projects to create the community they want to live in.
Hats off to Duncan Wong, Yoonji Lu, and David Wong for creating a Map App to help community citizens make their locations better places to live. Check out details on the app and find more information here!
We talked to so many developers from the Southern California region and had a great time sharing what Esri’s ArcGIS platform could do for them. HackforLA! exposed Esri to a wide array of developers who wanted to know just what Esri’s mapping platform could do. We had an awesome opportunity to talk to people about web map querying, drag and drop CSV to points, and analytics. HackForLA! gives us momentum moving forward for building focused demos that do just that: show off what distinguishes the ArcGIS Platform for mapping development to the location-minded software builder.