Area civic hackers will put their brains and skills to work solving city problems during this year’s National Day of Civic Hacking, being held Friday and Saturday at the old Richmond Academy building on Telfair Street.
Chemical process engineer Perry Levin, who spends his days at Savannah River Site, said the event prompted him to address a concern raised by a recent visitor to Augusta.
“It caused me to think about what I can do,” Levin said. “I had noticed a couple of months ago that some of the information about the transit system wasn’t very straightforward.”
Unlike many cities, information about Augusta Public Transit routes and schedules isn’t incorporated into apps, such as Google maps, and don’t show up as a means of getting from one place to another when someone uses a maps application.
So Levin is obtaining publicly available GPS and scheduling data on the routes and stops from the city, and for his Day of Civic Hacking project, he will put it into the correct format to make it sustain Google’s sometimes rigorous testing and appear in travelers’ online search results.
The event has been hosted since 2013 by theClubhou.se and this year makes its debut at the innovation collaborative’s new headquarters in the old Academy of Richmond County building, 540 Telfair St.
The hacking that goes on at theClubhou.se is a good thing.
“It’s creative problem solving, doing what you want to make the world the way you want it,” said co-founder and Innovation Architect Eric Parker. “One of our core values is to share solutions.”
Parker said his civic hacking project will be seeking ways to better communicate theClubhou.se’s new location – directly across Telfair from the remodeled Augusta Municipal Building’s new façade – in relation to other downtown landmarks, parking and pedestrian routes as a way to spur further development in the area.
TheClubhou.se is expecting between 30 and 50 hackers to participate and anyone can attend. This year, organizers have added the first annual Hack Augusta awards “to make it more awesome,” said Clubhou.se member Chase Lanier.
Thursday, he and Parker were working on a computer-controlled router they were using to create the awards, which will go to the day’s winners and to others who make civic hacking a way of life.
This month’s event replaces the group’s monthly First Friday hackathon and starts at 5 p.m. with idea sharing and pitching and partnering. The next morning from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. participants will work to complete their projects, he said.
The group, whose members pay small fees to use its numerous workspaces, is steadily renovating the historic building’s interior. Its member companies, several of which operate out of the space, had a $5 million impact on the local economy in the last year, he said.
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