Local civic tech hackathons and uncoferences are a great way to get to know a community even as it is gelling into one. I went to Hack the Commute, hosted by the City of Seattle and the Washington State Department of Transportation, and was very happy to see a number of familiar faces there. It was a great event, and very well run — a good role model for future hackathons.
As someone who can wear multiple hats I am never quite what role I will fall into at these events — research scientist, data analyst, developer, designer, artist — however by some intuition I brought my Mac to this hackathon (loaded up with Illustrator and Photoshop) and joined the Dokoji team as the designer for a day. They are developing an app that “turns your conversation in to smart decisions”. It was a very interesting problem — how might we integrate different sources of open data relevant to the moment-to-moment context of a text conversation, as people seek to converge in place and time?
Here are some of my design mockups:
Design mockups exploring integrating contextually relevant open data and social media into text messaging conversation.
The full slide deck for our short wrap-up presentation is posted on github here. To quote their summary:
“For Hack the Commute, we integrated data sets that would allow people to explore green transportation options, so once a group of people had picked a destination, they would be presented with 3 options: Find the closest bus using the OneBusAway data set; find the closest bike rental location using the Pronto data set; and a carpool option (future implementation). On the back end, we also integrated impact data from Washington State Department of Transportation. “
Thanks to the Dokoji team, it was great fun hacking the commute with you.