Andrew Hyder

89 points
San Francisco

Andrew Hyder is a civic hacker who enjoys making apps and maps. He is the developer relations engineer at Code for America where he travels the world helping volunteers build useful technology for their cities. As a 2013 CfA Fellow in Kansas City he advised on open data legislation, helped organized a volunteer Brigade, and developed BizFriend.ly to help small business owners adopt new technology. A trained urban planner he has built school yards, bicycle paths, and neighborhood parks around the Bay Area.

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hackyourcity
How to get started in civic hacking

Yeah, they've open up a lot in the last year. http://open-source.socrata.com/
If its enough to run your own portal, I'm not sure.

hackyourcity
How to get started in civic hacking

Thanks for the reply Shane.

Civic technology is local for sure, though many projects are trying to abstract out so that locality doesn't matter as much. Code for America has been putting some work into making services like <a href="http://www.cityvoiceapp.com/">City Voice</a> be easily reusable by many different cities.

Your points about sustainability and governance are the main struggles the civic technology movement are dealing with. Most of the successful projects are completely community supported through the volunteer <a href="http://codeforamerica.org/brigade">Brigade</a> program or are supported heavily by the local gov, such as the <a href="http://chicagoflushots.org/">Chicago Flu Shot Finder</a>. One of the requirements we have for someone to start a new Brigade is for them to have City Hall employees be a founding part of the group.

We are working towards building a comprehensive view of projects being worked on. We've got <a href="http://codeforamerica.org/api/projects">the API</a> set up so far, but no visualizations besides that Brigade web page yet.