Local challenges
Help the Indianapolis Mayor’s Action Center reduce the number of incoming calls from citizens requesting trash-related information.
Help create new visualizations and heat maps, using accident and Indiana State Police open data.
Help create new visualization/app for a variety of local data sets.
Some of the state’s greatest tech thinkers met in Indianapolis to create programs and applications looking to combat some of the city’s largest problems.
Indy Civic Hack Day pitted several groups of computer-savvy teams against each other Saturday to solve problems, including reducing calls to the Mayor’s Action Center about trash information and creating maps to predict and stop traffic accidents.
The event was part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, which aims to help communities across the country offer more access to data and to solve problems.
Andrew Baumann, a Ball State senior computer science major, was at the event to help create a map of Indianapolis road conditions and accidents to help predict problem areas.
Baumann was working with his team of Indy Xterns, Indianapolis-area tech interns who live together on IUPUI’s campus, working and learning from each other to create the next must-have app.
He said the experience of living with several tech-minded individuals offered a chance to create new products and ideas.
Learning outside of the classroom is the only way to learn what the real world will be like after graduation, Baumann said.
“Classrooms are great, but you learn everything on the job,” he said. “The only way to learn and work on projects that matter are on internships.”
Also at the event was Steve Hodges, director of product development at MOBI Wireless Management. His team wanted to create a system to help Hoosiers get information about trash and recycling.
He said they were using their Saturday to try to make the Indianapolis mayor’s job just a little bit easier and also to try to save taxpayer’s money.
“A lot of us just want to give back,” he said.
Teams accessed city data to make their projects through an open data portal created by Socrata, a Seattle-based company that works with governments to pool information into one easy-to-access place.
Jesse Romine, a regional director for Socrata, said competitions like Indy Civic Hack Day offer a place for collaboration between companies to create something for the greater good of Indianapolis.
“These types of [collaborative events] can create innovations that don’t even exist today,” he said.
Indianapolis’s tech industry is growing. The city was ranked by Forbes in late 2013 as one of the top 10 metros in the country for creating tech jobs.
Baumann said the number of jobs and relative lack of capable people to fill those positions means anyone with the drive to learn has a chance at getting a good paying job in technology.
“I can get any job I want,” he said. “Options are almost limitless if you are passionate about [technology].”
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