NYCEDC

Aug
02

This weekend the City of New York hosted its first-ever hackathon, Reinvent NYC.GOV, the first step in our transparent process to redesign our City’s website.

We’d like to thank the over 100 designers, developers, City representatives, hackathon judges and technology partners that came together to support and imagine the future of nyc.gov at host General Assembly’s space. The 14 teams that worked from July 30-31 generated creative, innovative ideas that will inspire and inform the redesign of nyc.gov’s web presence.

A few themes emerged throughout the demos, including search, crowdsourced Q & A, social media integration, location-based customization, citizen dashboards and gaming mechanics.

After the demos, a judges panel representing City agencies, TechStars, Meetup and General Assembly conferred and awarded 5 prizes to top teams:

Most Innovative prize went to Ask.NYC.Gov, with an approach that allows residents to ask questions in a search or connect with a city official that would answer their question.

Team Apple Seed’s NYC.gov won the Best User Interface award with its visually appealing search function and coordinating mobile interface.

Best Use of Social went to @NYC, with its use of weather and news widgets as well as multi-language search and an easy-to-use menu.

Nyc.gov Local Filtering won the Best Use of Local, featuring most frequently used functions, as well as easy links from the homepage.

The Judges’ Choice went to MyNYC.gov, which aims to increase civic participation with a reward points system that can be redeemed for grants to address local causes.

Other notable mentions are NYC.gov Visual Design +Dashboard+Mobile from CivicPlus, which refreshes nyc.gov homepage with bright graphics and photos as well as a personalized dashboard. NYC.gov Rework is based strongly on search with a homepage resembling Google and lists results with integrated content and social media. Finally, Uber presented a widget for accurate car travel prediction that could be embedded in any website.

Special thanks to Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, Commissioner Carole Post of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT), Commissioner Katherine Oliver of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME); hosts Matt Brimer and Adrian Ryan of General Assembly; judges Mimi O. Chun of General Assembly, Steven Strauss of New York City Economic Development Corporation, Scott Heiferman of Meetup, Dave Tisch of TechStars, Girish Chhugani (DOITT), Willy Wong of NYC & Company; City technology representatives Andrew Nicklin (DOITT), Tin Lau (DOITT), Chris Long (DOITT), Steve Bezman (DOITT); tech partners Google, Facebook, Bitly, Meetup, DonorsChoose, ExpertLabs, Foursquare and SeeClickFix; and Chris Coffey, Matt Gorton, Julie Wood, Jeanette Moy, Nick Sbordone, Ilyas Frenkel, Brian Levin and Christina Cioffe.