One Day Workshop to Build an Awesome Mobile App
Today the Code for Oakland 2012 organizing team met to kick off the planning for the 2012 event. Tentatively planned for late July, we are hoping to build on the success of last year (one of our teams won a prize from the FCC Apps for Communities contest). If you’re interested in joining in the planning, comment here and we’ll hook you up.
Last April, Last April, Knight Foundation and the Federal Communications Commission challenged developers and citizens from across the country to develop apps that deliver personalized, actionable information for the Apps for Communities Challenge. The prizes? $100,00 and more for live, shipped apps entered into the contest.
Fast-forward10 months and 70 submitted apps to December 15, 2011, when the winners were announced. The 3rd prize winner, Txt2wrk, is an Oakland-based team that was awarded both the $10,000 third prize and a $5,000 additional prize for best use of SMS. The team, comprised of Oakland residents David Chiu,Elise Ackerman, Roger Ly, and Lawson Kight, met at the Code for Oakland event organized by Oakland Local, InOak, and Urban Strategies Council, with support from The City of Oakland, the Lake Merritt/Downtown Business Improvement district, and a host of local supporters, including The Ramsell Corporation, Pandora, Mozilla, Skytide, Tumis Design, Full Court Press, Winning Strategies, ODALC, Arctice Fox Hosting and more.
Txt2wrk is an SMS and feature phone based app that connects job seekers and employers by providing text-to-speech delivery of job postings on any mobile phone. Job seekers receive text message alerts of new job postings, listen to job descriptions, and submit job applications, 24-hours a day, all without a connection to the internet.
Txt2wrk is compatible with any mobile phone, ensuring job seekers with low literacy and limited access to broadband have equal access to public and private job resources offered by local workforce development and social service agencies. The target audience is parolees, homeless, and others without regular access to computers.
The complete team for Txt2wrk is Tanja Altamurto, Jonathan Chan, Dave Chiu, Patrick Crawford, Lawson Kight, Roger Ly, Allison McKeever and Alex Tam. Members of the team received their award at the Andreessen Horowitz Offices in Silicon Valley yesterday.
For many of the winners of Code for Oakland, June will be a busy month working on apps. Apps should be submitted to the Apps4Communities challenge by July 11th.
If you didn’t finish (or start your app) this past weekend, here are some resources that will help you keep going:
Arctic Fox Hosting has provided several free hosting accounts for Code for Oakland participants. If you don’t have a place to host your app, you can do it on a locally-provisioned development environment that runs a LAMP stack and is available immediately. Contact Mike Gagnon (mike@pikalabs.com) to get access to this environment.
Join fellow coders, designers, and hackers on Wednesday evenings to work on your app (or start a new one). RSVP: anca@techliminal.com.
Tech Liminal is located at 268 14th Street (between Harrison and Alice).
Posts about Saturday’s wonderful hack day and all the apps folks built and the discussions we had are going up later today, but no reason to hold back from sharing the photos Howard Dyckoff took of the day, and a link to Steve Spiker’s cool photos as well.
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| OL-code4oakland-2011 |
What am amazing day! Over 102 people registered, 85+ showed up despite rain, and so many good things came out of the first Code for Oakland, including new APIs and datasets (see http://codeforoakland.org/data-sets), native Oaklanders blending with techies from across the Bay, lots of discussion and hacking to build Oakland-focused mobile apps for the FCC/Knight competition, and a resolve to keep the energy going (more on that to come).
Here’s the list of the winners–
$1500 Ramsell prize:Txt2work, mobile app to allow re-entering prisoners and parolees to search and apply for jobs via their feature phone. Team led by Elise Ackerman and David Chiu.
$500 Ramsell prize for youth,: BettaStop (@BettaSTOP), SMS app to allow commenting on quality of bus rides on ACTransit in Oakland. Team led by Krys Freeman (@bLaKtivist).
$1000 Mozilla prize: Redirectory, platform for allowing mobile feature phone, web and smart phone access to local social services data, focus particularly on parolee and reentry data. Team led by Randall Leeds.
$1000 Pandora prize: OakWatch, mobile/web project to allow real time neighborhood reporting via mobile systems. Team lead by Robbie Trencheny.
$500 Urban Strategies Council–for work with Re-entry Data API prize: Redirectory, platform for allowing mobile feature phone, web and smart phone access to local social services data, focus particularly on parolee and reentry data. Team led by Randall Leeds.
$500 City of Oakland, for work with Oakland files prize: OaklandPM, schema to use social sharing and city & OUSD calendar information to build a mobile tool to let teens find out what after-school activities are available and which friends are going. Team led by Jed Parsons.
$250 Full Court Communications prize: Contxt, mobile service focuses on SMS text messaging: broadcast messaging to community organizers. Team led by Tim Sheiner.
$250 Full Court Communications prize: Oakland Food Finder, mobile/web service for allowing Oakland low-income shoppers (and others) to find out where healthy foods are available in their area and for food supplies (farmers markets, etc.) to broadcast what they have available. Team led by Michael Bernstein.
plus an in-kind prize from Citizen Space, 3 months of workspace( worth $1350)–to be share by the winners.
Prize winners ($500 and over) sign a contract to launch their app and enter it in Apps4Communites and get the check when that happens (deadline for competition is July 11).
After Hackathon prizes are awarded, join us for the Code for Oakland after party. It will start around 7-7:30 at:
Dogwood
1644 Telegraph, Oakland
I’m sitting in for a bit with the transit hack team at the Code for Oakland Hackathon. Chris Peeples, director at large from the AC Transit Board of Directors, is offering some deep insight into the history of transit data in & around Oakland.
He said: “All lettered buses go across the Bay. But all lettered buses also are assigned a number in our system, because our old computer system couldn’t handle letters. So the numbers are still in there.”
Seriously.
Chris Peeples from the AC Transit Board at Code for Oakland, June 4, 2011
These project ideas came up in the welcome session for Code for Oakland today, and teams will be working on developing them today. Team leader name is listed after each idea.
See the list… [Read more...]
Here are some notes from the Community Listening Session on Friday, June 3. Thanks to Cynthia Mackey for collecting the notes!
Here’s the list… [Read more...]
About to head over to Code for Oakland. Wanted to share a first list of some of the hard-working committee members who have made this happen. There have been lots of people involved, many behind the scenes–so if I’ve left you off this list, please let me know and I can correct it.
Meanwhile, big thanks go to… [Read more...]
We’d like to thank the following sponsors, who helped put on the first Code for Oakland in June 2011.
If you’d like to sponsor our 2012 event, please contact us.
