Genius Hoard + BHW = National Day of Civic Hacking Triumph!

Photo by James Lockridge.

This past weekend we co-hosted Burlington's first National Day of Civic Hacking. The event was a big success with 50 hackers, 9 projects, and an estimated 675 hours of time contributed.

Deerfield Valley Rescue, Bethel Food Shelf, and Woodstock Job Bank all got new websites in a collaboration with the Vermont Digital Economy Project. Big Heavy World got a new discussion forum along with a prototype for a directory of live music venues throughout Vermont. Other projects included an app for Green Up Vermont, a Burlington Wiki, and a visualization of fish stocking schedules using data from Vermont Fish & Wildlife. One ambitious project involved porting GIS data of the Lake Champlain Basin into the game Minecraft, for educational purposes.

You can read a summary of the projects worked on here: http://codeforbtv.org/

Here is a Storify of the event: http://sfy.co/bKC4

The event got a ton of press coverage. Here are some links: WCAX: Civic hacking Seven Days: National Day of Civic Hacking Comes to Vermont VPR: When The Computer Hacker Becomes ‘The Good Guy’ Fox 44: National Day of Civic Hacking - New Apps Being Created to Help Community Burlington Free Press: A National Day of Civic Hacking in BTV WCAX: National Day of Civic Hacking hits Burlington WPTZ: Coders, designers hack for change

We're not stopping here! With our friends at Found Line we launched Code for BTV, a Code for America Brigade, during the National Day of Civic Hacking. The next Code for BTV meetup will be on June 22, 2013 from 1-5pm at CCTV Center for Media & Democracy. The goal of this meetup will be to continue working on the civic hacking projects started during the National Day of Civic Hacking, including the new Big Heavy World web site.

Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen!