I recently participated in the Boston meet up for the National Day of Civic Hacking on Saturday, June 1st. The National Day of Civic Hacking is inspired in part by President Obama’s Executive Order issued in May to establish an Open Data Policy and brought together citizens, software developers and entrepreneurs from all over the nation to collaboratively create, build and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve the challenges relevant to every neighborhood, city, town and state.
The room was filled with about 40 coders and software developers ready to work together to design computer applications and programs to allow people to access technology in ways to help others. According to the National Day of Civic Hacking website, one team in Washington, D.C. worked with the U.S. Department of Labor to design a system that connects women veterans with important available resources, such as childcare, transportation and support for PTSD. Another DC-based team worked with a representative from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to use a massive open CFPB dataset to create meaningful visualizations that help shed light on the scope of consumer complaints filed with the agency.
A friend of mine who writes code had told me about the big weekend event over a month ago, and it piqued my interest given my work in making the state budget more transparent through Open Checkbook and making corporate tax breaks more transparent. I submitted the Help4OK project (#Help4OK hashtag on Twitter) to build on local efforts for crisis management response following the Boston Marathon bombings and disasters like Irene and Sandy. The project is based on a website for Oklahoma tornado victims to connect people who need help with people who can give help. The goal of the Help4OK challenge is to design a website that is 100% mobile friendly and hosted publicly on drupal.org. Check out the Help4OK challenge at http://hackforchange.org/challenge/help4ok-0.
The report I received from project leader Jamie Meredith was encouraging and inspiring. 7 participants from the original group logged in 14 hours working on the Help4OK challenge, hashing out concepts and coding to carry out the goals of the Help4OK challenge. Over two days, team members made great strides to streamline the Help4OK website and simplify crisis response to future disasters.
That Saturday, the group focused on discussion about the logistics and realities of response to a disaster and how that would intersect with a disaster response application. Specifically, they looked at scenarios where government organizations pre-prepare for events by having information ready to feed into a disaster response application. The following day, the shift was made to look specifically at what scenarios would be the most common in a disaster situation and what information would need to be gathered and shared. Additionally, the user scenarios were outlined for interaction with the distribution and discussed the challenges of establishing a distribution that is easy for a non-technical person to setup and operate. The weekend ended with a 10 minute presentation given by all the participants in the group with a great amount more work to do to perfect the app.
Selected projects from the National Day of Hacking will be featured at an event sponsored by the White House at the end of July in tandem with President Obama’s focus on STEM education. For more information on the projects that were launched across the country on the National Day of Civic Hacking, check out http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/06/07/thousands-americans-innovate-good-national-day-civic-hacking.
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings and Hurricane Sandy, I am eager to see the outcome of the project and how it can be utilized to help victims during future disasters. This event is a great example of how state government can better take advantage of technology and the wealth of hi-tech talent we have in Massachusetts to improve the delivery of services of government to residents. My experience two Saturdays ago was an exciting introduction to how this could be done.
Last week’s revelations that the federal government has at their finger tips every phone call each of us has made. To and from whom, the location of where each individual was when the calls were made, and the duration of the calls. The calls were not recorded (we have been).
Were issues like this discussed formally or informally at the conference and do you agree with President Obama’s position on this?
n/t
Ernie, the National Day of Civic Hacking was two Saturdays ago, so it occured before the revelations about the actions of the NSA involving telecommnications, and therefore did not come up.
That being said, I do not support President Obama’s policy, and as a strong supporter of civil liberties, I am deeply disturbed by the revelations. I appreciate the work that the ACLU is doing right now to push back against these policies, as well as media such as The Guardian. I hope that more American reporters and media begin to ask tougher questions of the administration on this subject, as well as our federal legislators.
I’m also interestesd to hear more about the positions of the different prospective candidates for U.S. Congress on this important subject.
this is not a party or political issue and should unite the biggest cross-section of interests not seen since Pearl Harbor.
Given EB3’s comment, I just to be super, super clear about what we’re talking about…although I think you explained it already pretty well. So, apologies in advance to all those for whom the following is obvious, redundant, or tangential.
As you say in the post, the information from the National Day of Civic Hacking comes from publicly available data and information. So, the information might come from public spaces — like the US Census. Or, to give another example, it would be like when the MBTA opened up its data so people could make better T apps.
The NSA data collection is far, far different and unrelated.
What the government can do thanks to the NSA, and what we’ve know that Google or Verizon or really any big private company with access to lots of data could do, is make lists of people and sort them in any way they like — what kind of shoes a subgroup likes, or, who people associate with. If you don’t like a company gathering your information, you can opt-out of it, generally. Don’t like Verizon? Go to a different phone carrier or don’t use one, etc. But there is no opt-out when the Federal government requires that everybody turn over their records. Should the government decide it wants to target a certain type of person, they now have an extremely efficient way of doing so. That’s for the good–we want the government to be able to target groups like Al-Qaeda, etc. And I trust that’s what the Obama Administration is using it for. This program, however, was created in secret with little to no public debate.
In some ways, what the NSA leaks reveal is that the government has inverted much of the public/private relationship. We are *private* citizens being served by *public* government. The only reason why we know about this program is because of leakers–the government took great pains to keep this program secret. In effect, that means that the governments actions are increasingly private, unknown by the public, and the private citizens actions are increasingly known by the government–public servants. With a nice twist, they seem to outsource a good amount of this work to private contractors.
More, there was no transparent, open debate about what the scope of this program should be. In other words, had the President and Congress had a public debate and said, “We want to roll out a program that does x y z to fight terrorists in a b c ways,” that would be one thing. But they didn’t, and instead the public’s understanding of what the law allows is actually very different from what the government believes it has the right to do.
That is problematic for a variety of reasons, and I’m not really scratching the surface of this particular can of worms.
Civic hacking, by contrast, is an attempt to make government work better. To take public data sets about what the government does in public and make it more efficient, and make the government work better for you. So, I understand why the first comment immediately is about the NSA (when we think about Big Data we think NSA.) But the two are really quite different and unrelated.