By Howard Dyckoff
More than 140 committed digital citizens gathered on July 21st at the Code for Oakland event. Hackers and coders worked to improve life here in Oakland and throughout Alameda County.
The grand prize went to Hack the Budget, which allows anyone in Oakland to review the city budget and express their views. The app, which was awarded $1000, is designed to be accessible from a mobile phones and web browsers.
Hack The Budget also took the prize for the best civic engagement tool.
510eat.org earned the runner-up slot. The application is designed to share restaurant inspection data collected by the Alameda County Health Department. That may tell us things we don’t want to know about our favorite eateries and may drive customers to new businesses. But I don’t think it will help new restaurants to open in Deep East, where it’s mostly fast food outlets.
A prize for the best use of civic data went to the Edible Fruit Trees project, which connects homeowners who have surplus fruit with interested Oaklanders.
And there was also a project that may be the most used in Deep East Oakland: Top Cop, which is a mobile app for rating OPD officers.
There was lots of food and caffeine, and interesting presentations from the open source software company Red Hat. Participants also heard from Code for America – the organization that helped create Code for Oakland. Code for Oakland is dedicated to civic improvement through Internet development.
Code for America said Oakland would be a focus of its work in 2013, and that has to be good news. That will be the third year the group runs projects in individual cities around the nation.
As for the Code for Oakland event, interactions there have seeded some on-going efforts to develop other new applications for social and civic engagement. (I am working with a group preparing a web site to help visualize data sets from Oakland and Alameda County.)
Click here for a slide show from the Code for Oakland event.
Howard Dyckoff has lived in Oakland for over 40 years and has been involved with many community groups, including Oakland Digital and Oakland Local, Block by Block, the East Oakland Boxing Association (EOBA), and CBE. A Brooklyn, New York, transplant, and an Aerospace Engineering graduate of NY Polytechnic, Howard also attended Laney College, where he wrote for the Laney Tower newspaper and was elected editor. Howard also attended the Starr King School at the Theological Union in Berkeley.
He has served as the Berkeley Free Clinic’s Outreach Coordinator, and also worked as an information technology professional at Chevron, Sybase, and Wells Fargo. He worked in both the 2010 and 2020 Census. Howard has been a regular contributor to Oakland Local and online publications such as TechTarget and Linux Gazette and currently writes for Oakland Voices. He currently does event photography and portraiture around the Bay Area.
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