Read about the Hack Omaha winner: “Food Fight gamifies restaurant ratings, wins Hack Omaha“
Hack Omaha, a programming competition, in the style of Startup Weekend, that required teams to build their projects using datasets of public government information, wrapped up Sunday night in the Omaha World-Herald‘s downtown building. The World-Herald, the producer and host of the competition, supplied datasets to teams and, in the spirit of the event, required the projects to be open-sourced.
Omaha Food Fight, an app that aims to educate its users on the food establishment ratings handed out by the Douglas County Health Department, took home the top prize, and apps Safe Omaha, an interactive crime heat map, and Slum Lord Next Door, a tool to search a neighborhood for major landowners and code violators, were named runner-ups. Projects were judged on four criteria: revelation – “all products should answer a question or tell people something they didn’t know” – completion, creativity and design.
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Here are the eight projects pitched in the 43-minute video above (linked to app if available):
- 0:00 – Poligraph: Showing relationships that form between donors and legislators (Anne Marie Weiner, Jordan Kellerstrass, Chris McMacken, Ross Nelson, Dave Loyall and Nate Benes)
- 6:00 – Safe Omaha: An interactive crime heat map (Nick Wertzberger, Ryan Stille, Todd Hatcher, Nick Nisi, Trevan Hetzel and Doug Martin)
- 11:30 – Valuation Comparison Interface: A way to see property value with statistical analysis, such as seeing price of other properties on a curve (Team: Jack Byrnes, Mitch Barry and Jay Hannah)
- 16:35 – Omaha Food Fight: A mobile game where you try to guess which restaurants have the best food inspection ratings. (Matt Steele, Mike Ask, Nate Ryan and Steve Samson)
- 21:40 – Voting Registration App: An app making voter registration data easy to search (Jeff Kastl, Stephen Stewart and Adam West)
- 26:50 – Is It Clean: Mobile app that makes it easy to find out if where you’re going to eat is safe (Jerrid Kimball, Christian Burk, Hasani Hunter and Evan Johnson)
- 32:30 – Omaha Bounty Hunter: “The Price is Right” for stolen property values (Jerod Santo and Zack Leatherman)
- 37:25 – Slum Lord Next Door – Tool to search your neighborhood for major landowners and code violators (Nate Smith, Patrick Keaveny, Brian Smith, Julia Smith, Eric Burns and Matt Reinsch)
Also, built at Hack Omaha but did not pitch:
- Play Safe Omaha – Map of safe places for your kids to play (Rob Jensen)
Here are more pictures from the weekend event:
Hack Omaha was held on the first and second floor of the Omaha World-Herald building in downtown Omaha.
Poligraph kicks off the pitch competition on Sunday evening.
More than 50 developers, designers, journalists and civic instigators attended Hack Omaha.
Omaha Bounty Hunter gave a live demo of their app that has users guessing the price of stolen property.
Credits: Photos by Danny Schreiber.
Disclosure: Silicon Prairie News is a media sponsor of Hack Omaha.