LINCOLN— Lincolnites with an eye toward making public data more useful will get a chance to work with a number of state and local data sets in October.
Open Nebraska, a “civic hacking” group, is hosting its first weekend hackathon in Lincoln Oct. 17-19. Hack Lincoln begins Friday at 6 p.m. and continues through Sunday at 9 p.m. at Firespring, 1201 Infinity Ct.
Organizer Nate Benes says Hack Lincoln is a 48-hour hackathon bringing together developers, technologists, designers and civic advocates to wrangle civic data sets and to learn new ideas and techniques while building “cool stuff” in a fun environment. The event is an extension of a successful Hack Omaha event, which has had three iterations.
“We’ve had a lot of Lincoln folks excited about it, but the Hack Omahas have been very Omaha-focused data sets,” Benes said. “We want to give Lincolnites a shot to work with something that matters to their community.”
BECOME A SPONSOR
Join us in championing the narrative of success, resilience, and ingenuity that defines Nebraska’s startup community. Learn more »
Participants show up Friday night to get introduced to the data sets, form teams and get to work. By Sunday, Benes said the goal is to have a “proof of concept” or minimum viable product. Benes said it is unrealistic to have a fully-crafted product done in just two days.
The data sets include campaign finance data from the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission, 12 years worth of crash and traffic data from Lincoln police and the roads department and some building permit data. Benes said he hopes to get some data from Lincoln libraries as well as some info from the city attorney, who is interested in making the city code more accessible to the average resident.
It’s up to each team to figure out what they want to create or do with the data.
Matt Waite, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln journalism professor with a bent toward data journalism, will judge the entries with more judges to be announced later.
Benes said the winnings are mostly for bragging rights.
He’s been pleasantly surprised by the number of interested parties at previous events.
“There’s a lot of technically-minded people out there that want to do something for the community,” he said. “And the audience keeps getting bigger and bigger. Non-tech people… Librarians, teachers, city employees are getting excited about the event, too.
“It’s reaching a broader audience.”
Past projects from Hack Omaha include a public transit travel time program called Transit Party, a food inspection map, and an interactive listing of local boards and openings for those boards. While some projects haven’t been updated, Benes said all of them are open sourced so others can pick up where others left off.
