Interactions - July/August 2014

will.i.am, best known as a singer from the Black Eyed Peas. Young staff from his i.am.angel foundation provided the logistical labor to put together the event and the PR nous to bring enough celebrity buzz to attract local media.

The challenge phase moved deftly from enthusiastic encouragement (“You guys are AWESOME for giving up your weekend!”) to blatant pragmatism (“We’re hiring”) from the tech-company reps dominating the sponsorship register. Meanwhile, the political interests at play were obvious when, prior to the commencement of coding, the city’s mayor-elect, Eric Garcetti, arrived to formally open the proceedings.

Garcetti used his speech to set an agenda for office: coding classes in local high schools and a CTO for L. A. in his first term. The speech was high on rhetoric, part of the broader frenzy intended to mobilize the volunteer labor. His comments revealed some fascinating assumptions about government: It’s broken. It cannot fix the most basic things for its citizens.

Lauding the hackers, he acknowledged
that anything they did that day would
matter, would be better than what
was in place now. “You don’t accept
the world as it is,” he said, riffing off
the youthful vibe. The bottom line for
government and civic participation
was captured by the logic “You didn’t
make it worse.” This was Garcetti’s
idea of a joke, but it was pivotal. It was
a genuflection to the challenges facing
of this for design researchers is that
civic hackathons allow us to explore
how multiple notions of civics are being
constructed and enacted, and therefore
how they might be constructed and
enacted differently.

MAKING THE
CIVIC IMAGINARY

In Atlanta, the National Day of Civic Hacking took place in an office building along one edge of the Georgia Institute of Technology. At the cusp of the university campus and the midtown neighborhood, the Centergy Building embodies a desired porousness between the university, industry, and the city: Local startups and university spinouts operate alongside business advocacy groups, steps away from the renowned Georgia Tech GVU research center and the Institute for People and Technology.

The primary organizers of the Atlanta National Day of Civic Hacking were the Technology Association of Georgia and Random Hacks of Kindness, a national organization that hosts hackathons on a regular basis. These organizations and their efforts were supported by a range of corporations, including Intel, Socrata, and SecondMuse, each with different commitments across the nexus of civic and data economies.

Challenges are often the internal organizing structure of hackathons, which was certainly the case at the Atlanta National Day of Civic Hacking.

The challenges included the use of
Census Bureau data and APIs to create
apps of use to local businesses, the
development of an aggregate interactive
map of the local food system, the design
of the information architecture for
a website proposed to catalog future
civic media projects and initiatives in
Atlanta, as well as a series of challenges
proposed by the Peace Corps to support
field workers in their international
work. The challenges thus connected
the desire to showcase local capacities
for innovation and entrepreneurship
with the desire to contribute national,
if not global, endeavors “for the good.”
Some participants lived only a mile
away, while others drove for two hours
to get there, reflecting the status of
Atlanta as a region as well as the draw
of the event. Teams quickly formed
around the challenges and began
working. In the first few hours, sticky
notes appeared on walls, and boxes and
arrows were drawn on whiteboards.

By the afternoon of the first day, many were staring intently into laptop screens, typing, and conferring with those around them. We and other participants took part in the rituals of hackathons: Together we ate pizza in the evening, and the following morning we ate bagels as the work continued. The afternoon of the second day brought the presentations—prototypes in various stages of completion, most working to some extent, but all far from being functionally implemented.

On the same day in Los Angeles, greeted by egg muffins and coffee, hundreds of people converged on the Boyle Heights Youth Technology Center to take part in Hack for L. A., which was one of the Los Angeles– based National Day of Civic Hacking events. Palm trees and sunshine framed the site, nestled in an other wise gritty urban neighborhood just off the 101 freeway. Organizers began the hackathon with a prerecorded You Tube welcome from event sponsor and patron