austin design week

[werdnanoslen]

Austin Design Week is an annual celebration of design through a week of workshops, talks, studio tours and events. We are partnering with Austin Spark League to run a week long design-a-thon. Their leader Nick Hahn has started a proposal here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mKZqkPtqToTnelCmgprc2H8oFQuiQzu_hswBJkBs_4w/edit

[VictoriaODell]

@werdnanoslen what is going on with this? I saw them mention stuff on their site but it doesn't appear we are involved.

https://austindesignweek.org/design-a-thon

[werdnanoslen]

yeah actually i hadnt heard anything except from Nick that we should chat soon but I hadn't heard anything from them. Until today, when they posted this internally: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/austin-design-week-2017-presents-design-placemaking-for-local-civic-engagement-registration-38220248793

Looks like the organizers changed to some other folks I know that aren't involved in anything civic as far as I know. So I think they're just going in an entirely different direction. Looks like they don't want us involved, unless we ask to be? What do you think?

Seems rather ambitious and sweeping for a design week workshop:

"In this workshop, we will explore the what good citizenship looks like in a digitally disrupted society. Using design thinking, we will uncover the pain points and opportunities around civic engagement and develop innovative solutions to the age old problem of politics. From your participation you will take away a refined definition of citizenship,"

I'd list it in our usual local events list, but since we weren't really invited to any planning I don't think we can partner at this point.

[werdnanoslen]

See the email thread with info@open-austin.org for more info. TLDR, they're going in a direction that doesn't really align with our community, so we won't partner with them but would share their events among our other community events. Still want to keep discussing it though, so Vickie and I might chat with them this week.

[VictoriaODell]

Spoke with them today. @seandellis was on the call too. I think it went well.

Here is an involvement doc I drafted up base don our conversation : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KPqFqOxGhHhq2OatQmaHSiQ8kyeTzStXktibWeyM8-o/edit?usp=sharing

Here is the agenda + notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DOsxJzTU4vNk8ylLkPb9CbDAFo82cqN231OGI6UtE5w/edit?usp=sharing

[VictoriaODell]

We did it!

The design a thon went well. There were 6 teams and 2 projects were from the Open Austin/ ATX Hack for Change project repo. These were the projects OA brought:

Civic Tech/Service projects 
ATX Votes How might we help interested voters get credible, accurate information about how, where and when to vote https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/53

Austin Green Map An app with all the parks in Austin. Offline, mobile-friendly, and easy to search for features and amenities https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/1 
 CodeForAustin.org https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/102

Request Yo Racks  https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/117 
 Welcome Basket  https://github.com/atxhack4change/2016-project-proposals/issues/20

This was the civic hacking 101 deck used: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/174K-6DU4eNqT1FYkQeQYA6RI8r-fPbukmgwOD5n1zMA/edit?usp=sharing

The winners of the design-a-thon were a group of UT students that picked up the project, Request Yo Racks. They got 6 SXSW tickets and we'll work to keep their project going. There is the project lead and the transportation department involved at this point :)

More info on the event: https://austindesignweek.org/design-a-thon

A retrospective is being held sometime next week.