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carlvlewis / ndoch17

Ideation, planning and resource development to guide Savannah's National Day of Civic Hacking 2017, Sponsored by SEDA
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First, Focus on the Problem #1

Open carlvlewis opened 7 years ago

carlvlewis commented 7 years ago

Focus on the Problem

Hackathons work best when focused on a specific problem set. Want to do a hackathon about crime? Better call the police department. Want to do something around housing? Recruit somebody from the local housing authority or somebody who runs a shelter. When trying to think about the needs and challenges of the front line, there’s no substitute for somebody who actually works in that space to speak at your event and to help you identify the right problems to be solved.

carlvlewis commented 7 years ago

Potential NDOCH '17 SAV Theme Two: Information Overload on savannahga.gov

carlvlewis commented 7 years ago

Potential Three (3):

Savannah has a long and rich history of politically and civically active neighborhood associations, with a robust ecosystem of 59 such associations spanning across the city's formal boundaries. But despite their robust numbers, Savannah's neighborhood associations often lack the time, money, political capital, dedicated leadership and organizational infrastructure to exert the full scope of influence on City decision-making that they potentially could if more concrete processes were in place that better fostered inter-association collaboration, and technologies developed to help connect disparate, distributed actors in different neighborhoods in shared collective action in a timely manner. While The City of Savannah's new Neighborhoods website is a solid step in this direction, it primarily tackles the issue from an informational angle rather than an action-oriented angle.

For this Civic Hackathon challenge, teams will be tasked with designing, devising and pitching a potential open-source system that will foster stronger and more tactical inter-neighborhood collaboration and empower more effective community action in influencing decisions made by City Hall. While each team's system should ideally make use of new digital technologies to form the backbone of its communication and collaboration strategy, the solution need not be limited to the world of software alone. The strongest entries will apply a systems-thinking approach to the problem that may involve an array of different experimental modes of civic engagement. Building a technologically-brilliant piece of software without having a solid plan to incentivize neighborhood buy-in, a feedback mechanism to encourage the participation of elected officials and marketing strategies that both attract and retain citizen engagement will be less likely to accomplish the product's end goals.

Topline summary

Design/prototype a proof-of-concept product that might better connect disparate neighborhood associations with one another to unite among shared political causes.