This past Saturday a group of East Bay and San Francisco hackers, coders, researchers and press got together for a hastily organized opendata hackathon as part of the worldwide OpenData Day hackathon. Once again the commitment and enthusiasm shown by a great bunch of software engineers and developers impressed me: when so much media attention is directed at deriding the younger generations as lazy and entitled and selfish it's such a telling thing to have twenty people give up their entire Saturday to discuss local civic issues and build software applications to address common needs across our communities.

In true CityCamp format the attendees broke into two groups, one focused on a software app that was conceptualized on the day and the other group to learn and scheme around how technology can improve public accountability, political transparency and encourage both innovation and business development in the City of Oakland and Alameda County.  These unconference events are always an incredibly rich time of learning, sharing and connecting- it is far too rare an occasion that sees journalists, coders and social researchers collaborating and building on each other's knowledge and experience. We also had a video presentation from Jeanne Holm with the US Government's Data.gov team to share the work that s being led nationally to open up the enormous federal datasets for public use. The only component missing from this event was any representation from the city itself which was disappointing.

The developer team leaped onto a project formulated by a few of the attendees; the need to find fee-free ATMS for Credit Union members. The team was able to pull down data on all the local ATMS available to credit union members and build a HTML5 app that will work on any smart phone or newer browser. The service is online now at 99atms.com.

Into Action

It's great to see how an unmet need can be plugged by agile developers so fast and simply, and to see then how this work can be connected to the communities who need the access to information like this. Our own ACCAN collaboration (Alameda County Community Asset Network) is a perfect nexus for this great new resource- the group consists of 35 organizations in the county who are involved in serving low income families through credit repair, budgeting training, foreclosure prevention and a variety of other essential services to help low income families make better use of their limited resources and move along the pathway out of poverty. This is the perfect audience for a great new idea like 99atms.com, and by helping to connect innovative new ideas like this one that Max Ogden, Hoke and the rest of the team built to an audience that can put it to good use is one of the roles we relish here. Seeing great new tech and finding where to plug it in and have it make a real impact on our communities, that's a core part of our Research & Tech team's focus.

We need to thank Adriel Hampton for his quick support in getting this event launched and all the incredible crew who participated on the day. Oakland has so many unmet needs and we have a very exciting set of challenges to find sponsors for at our next big CityCamp Oakland in 2012. Follow us @infoalameda to keep up on progress for this next big event in the East Bay!

Press coverage on our event here.