Civic Innovations

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending a civic hacking event jointly organized by Code for Philly and Girl Develop It Philly. The event had a tremendously good turnout – over 50 people by my count – making it one of the larger events Code for Philly has organized in recent months.

The mission of Girl Develop It is to empower women to learn software development, and as a result there were a good number of people at the event being introduced to civic hacking for the first time. This got me thinking about ways to onboard people new to civic hacking (and people new to coding) into civic technology projects.

None of these is new, but here are five ideas I came up with after the event:

Data Liberation – the foundation of civic hacking project is open data, and far too much of the data civic hackers need is locked up in broken websites and unusable formats. Helping to break some of this data free can be a tremendous benefit to open data users and civic hacking projects.

Documentation – far too many open source and civic hacking projects go without proper documentation to help other developers contribute and to support end users. Helping to create or expand documentation for a project can be critical to helping it succeed.

User Testing – Organizing and conducting end user testing for civic technology projects is sadly rare. There are some efforts underway to change this but in order for civic hacking projects to improve and succeed we need real feedback from mainstream users.

Outreach – One legitimate criticism of civic apps is that too few people know they exist. There are efforts working to change this, like Apps for Philly (still in its infancy) – a site that lists a host of different civic technology apps that are available for users. Adding new projects to this listing (and others like it) will both help these projects succeed and give the person doing it a much clearer sense of the civic technology landscape.

Helper Libraries – a great way to get comfortable writing code and to help out a civic technology project is to write helper libraries for projects with APIs. At the Apps for Philly Transit Hackathon, one project utilized recently released data from the City of Philadelphia on bicycle thefts. The lead developer created a new API for this data to enable other projects to use it. Building new client libraries in a range of different languages would be a great way to support other developers that want to incorporate bike theft data into their projects, and to get some hands on experience writing code.

There are so many ways to contribute to open source projects and to help support civic hacking efforts – these are just a few.

We need more great events like the one organized by Code for Philly and Girl Develop it Philly to bring together all of the talented people we have in our city to work on these important projects.