VIP Hosts Hackathon in San Francisco
On Friday and Saturday, March 28 and 29, the Voting Information Project, or VIP, is hosting a civic hackathon at the Impact Hub in San Francisco. The event is being held ahead of California’s June 3 primary and will bring together designers, developers, students, and interested members of the public to leverage open data to improve voters’ access to election information.
Participants will compete on teams and choose among three tracks:
Parse + Build: Analyze VIP official feeds and integrate them into a Web or mobile application to make the data easily available to voters and elections officials.
Application programming interface, or API: Working with the Google Civic Information API as a foundation, contestants will create a new user experience for voters seeking their polling place, leverage the data to develop an entirely new application, or produce a mash-up with open data found outside of the API.
Reinventing: Update an existing VIP application by copying the original code, making improvements, and merging the changes with the original.
Judging criteria will include clear articulation of the app’s functionality and potential for implementation. VIP’s goal is to make this civic data more accessible and usable by voters and state and local election officials.
The hackathon website has details. Participants can register here.
This post was previously featured on Pew’s Election Data Dispatches. The Data Dispatches provide data, research, and analysis about election administration in the U.S.