J-School staff members Scot Hacker and Chuck Harris won a competition at the California Data Camp on Nov. 7 for their innovative web application using public data.
The "unconference," sponsored by Spot.us and California Watch, was a gathering of local citizens and web developers who met to discuss the issues surrounding public data in the state and how to use the data to benefit residents. During the meeting, organizers challenged attendees to create innovative applications using publicly available government data from the city of San Francisco.
Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, attended the meeting and told the group, "You are part of something bigger, a trend of something new. We are changing the ways how we govern ourselves."
Knight Digital Media Center Webmaster Scot Hacker and J-School Webmaster Chuck Harris won the competition for their application that tracks city-owned trees. The service allows residents to alert the city to trees that require maintenance, request the planting of a new tree and helps users identify the type of trees in their neighborhood. The application was based on the city's data base of 64,000 trees.
For winning the competition, Hacker and Chuck took home a $500 gift certificate to Apple and an iPod Touch.
Hacker invites others to adapt and improve on the application. He wrote on his website, "The project is completely open source and released under the very liberal BSD license – do with it as you will."
The application is available for download here.
Julia Marshall, Class of 2013
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