CitiVox

Highlights from Last Weekend’s Hackathon

Screenshot of application created to improve public access to government data

On the heels of the hackathon we hosted at our Mexico City offices, Desarrollando America Latina has posted all of the hacking for social good entries on its website. Check them out for a great way to get a sense of what happened at the event even if you weren’t there.

We were hugely impressed by the talent and dedicated (most spent all of Saturday night in our offices working on their projects) of the developers and designers that came from around the country to take part. So which issues did the hackers take on? Here are a few highlighted themes and apps!

Making the salary of health workers more transparent

A team from Sonora, Mexico created a user facing app to present data from the secretary of health about the earnings of health workers, in order to compare how much they should be earning with out how much they are earning.

Expanding the ease with which others can create applications using public data

The team from Oaxaca created an API that yields a json file for any public data set, so that others can more easily build presentations of this data that are geared towards the public at large. What was most interesting about the Oaxaca project was that they chose to combine public data on security and, more generally, budgeting, with citizen reports.This creates a virtuous circle, they wrote, wherein citizens send in reports based on expectations and knowledge that comes from having access to more information about what the government is doing, and makes decisions based on that data as well as on one anothers’ reports.

They weren’t the only hackers to focus on meta projects - applications that make it easier for other, perhaps less technical, citizens to access and play with public information. Two others, an application that attempted to enhance Twitter search, and one, called CrossMatch, that overlaid budget and population information on a country map, had these more general aims in mind. The latter won the weekend’s contest.

Here’s a video of CrossMatch’s presentation:

Measuring the effectiveness of government’s response to previous information requests

This application makes it easier to view and compare the responses to requests for information from different parts of the government, measuring the responsiveness of, say, the social security administration with the Mexican equivalent of the IRS.