18F/18f.gsa.gov

---
title: "Where we were for the National Day of Civic Hacking"
date: 2015-06-11 11:30:00
layout: post
authors:
- gray
- kara
- david
- mhz
tags:
- events
- hackathons

excerpt: "Last weekend, thousands of civic hackers from across the country came
together for the National Day of Civic Hacking to better their communities. We love this kind of stuff, and couldn't help but get involved."
description: "Last weekend, thousands of civic hackers from across the country came
together for the National Day of Civic Hacking to better their communities. We love this kind of stuff, and couldn't help but get involved."
image: /assets/blog/national-day-of-civic-hacking-2015/hacking-day-tucson.jpg
---
Last weekend saw thousands of civic hackers from across the country come
together to better their communities. For several years, the [National
Day of Civic Hacking](http://hackforchange.org/) has encouraged
government to work with passionate citizens who can further agency
missions by building resources that the public needs. We can’t get
enough of this. Fortunately, there were [more than 100 events](http://hackforchange.org/events/) across the country!

Here’s just some of what we worked on together:

![Pictures from the D.C. event]({{site.baseurl}}/assets/blog/national-day-of-civic-hacking-2015/hacking-day-dc.jpg)
*Scenes from the event in Washington, D.C.*

**Washington, D.C.**: The Small Business Administration and Census
Bureau [organized a great event](https://hackforchange.hackpad.com/National-Day-of-Civic-Hacking-DC-Small-Business-Edition-2015-June-6-2015-930am-6pm-C1TOw5LHMhE),
emceed by our Justin Herman, that focused on building tools that use
robust [CitySDK](http://uscensusbureau.github.io/citysdk/), an open
source toolkit built by Census. In addition to six projects that
integrated this, a team led by our Gray Brooks also built
[theunitedstates.io/APIs](https://theunitedstates.io/APIs/), a
campaign that organizes the various catalogs of federal APIs to make it
easier for developers to discover what web services the government
offers.

{{ "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/O4O7tonG3R8" | embed: "Small Business Administration and Census
Bureau great event" }}

**San Diego, Calif.**: [Open San Diego](http://opensandiego.org/)
produced the San Diego National Day activity, which took place downtown
at [Fab Lab](http://www.fablabsd.org/). Former San Diego Mayor (and
current Councilman) Todd Gloria was on hand to answer questions from the
audience of programmers, urbanists, designers, municipal staff, makers,
parents, and teens. Anchored around hands-on participation for all
levels of experience, the afternoon session centered on team-centered
code development challenges. In the first sprint our own Kara DeFrias,
who lives in San Diego, led a
[protosketching](https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/01/06/protosketch/) session
for a Street Sweeper app. We got from markers and drawing to working
code in less than an hour!

![The group of civic hackers in Tucson]({{site.baseurl}}/assets/blog/national-day-of-civic-hacking-2015/hacking-day-tucson.jpg)
*Civic hackers at the event hosted by Code for Tucson*

**Tucson, Ariz**: [Code for Tucson](http://codefortucson.org/),
co-founded by our own Michelle Hertzfeld, hosted an event at [CoLab
Workspace](http://startuptucson.org/colab6/). By the end of the day,
volunteer teams of organizers, programmers, designers, thinkers, and
communicators had made new tools for their community, including:

-   an Edible Arizona web app that links a person’s location to their
plant zone, and lets them plant the best trees for their area
based on University of Arizona [LEAF](https://arboretum.arizona.edu/linking-edible-arizona-forests-leaf-ua-campus)
data;
-   a mashup of federal CitySDK data with local farmer’s markets to
explore whether local markets are serving all communities based on
income and walkability;
-   a MyReps web app that lets people enter their zip code and return
all their elected representatives, down to their lowest level of
government;
-   an in-browser (or in-phone!) editor for the
[OpenTrails](http://stateofthemap.us/opentrails/) OpenStreetMap
specification that lets a person either draw a route by hand, or
go for a hike and track the route automatically.

**Dayton, Ohio**: Our Dave Best led [Code For
Dayton](http://codefordayton.org/)’s event at [Tech
Town](http://daytontechtown.com/). During the event, we:

-   ran an introduction to GitHub workshop by our Catherine Devlin
-   continued working on our REAP (real estate acquisition process) tool
with the city of Dayton
-   kicked off a local crowdfunding aggregation project with a community partner, the [Collaboratory](http://daytoncollaboratory.org/)

We want to extend our thanks and congratulations to all of the
organizers who put together events across the country. We had a great
time collaborating with you on these projects. Civic hacking events like
this showcase the innovations that are taking place across government,
and truly engage the public in developing the services they need. Let’s
keep it up.