Alameda County Hosts First Hackathon Apps Challenge in Castro Valley

Two developers work on their project during a
breakout session.

Cram dozens of computer programmers into the Castro Valley Library on a beautiful Saturday morning. Give them six hours to develop a website or smart phone application with government data and offer $5,000 in prizes to the three most innovative ideas; this is the Alameda County Apps Challenge.

Hosted by the county of Alameda, the hackathon invited local developers to compete in a one-day programming marathon with the goal of creating mobile applications that help Alameda County residents engage with local government through technology.

Tim Dupuis, Alameda County’s Interim Director of Information Technology and the Registrar of Voters, said the hackathon is part of the county’s Data Sharing Initiative, data.acgov.org, which showcases 80 different data sets such as crime statistics, health inspections and business directories.

“The hackathon is really for us to bring attention to the data and this whole idea of open government,” said Dupuis. “The board of supervisors, a year ago, recognized that the community is looking for intelligent, raw data, and we have a community that knows what to do with it. So, the board of supervisors directed me a year ago to start figuring out, what is open data, what is data sharing all about.”

The Apps Challenge is part of the open data movement, a movement that aims to help the public make sense of raw government data through technological innovations.

“There’s a huge amount of data that’s locked up in governments right now,” said Chris Metcalf, Director of Product Development and Developer Evangelism for Socrata, a sponsor of the event, “and its really hard for people to easily understand and make sense of that data and build applications on top of it, or even just analyze.”

Participants were given six hours to develop a
mobile app for Alameda County.

Around 100 programmers of diverse backgrounds participated in the Challenge, working on mobile apps ranging from a green business finder to crime prediction to a cheap and safe parking finder.

The first place prize of $3,000 went to a team who created an app called Book-It, which allows users to find and reserve library books.

Stephen Ou, 17-year-old Junior at Castro Valley High School, won the second prize of $1,500 with an app called Alameda County Parks and Recreation Finder.

“Pretty much, what it does is grab data from the county, and then it automatically generates a map with all parks next to you,” said Ou, who started programming in the eight grade. “It has park name, directions, phone numbers and what features [the park] has.”

The third place prize of $500 went to a group who created SNAP Mapper, an app allows people who rely on food stamps to find and review restaurants and markets accepting food stamps.

“I don’t’ know anything about any of this stuff, but it’s just fascinating seeing the creativity and ingenuity folks came up with over the course of the day, and then being able to present their concept in such a short period of time,” said Nate Miley, President of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. “We really want to promote and support these types of endeavors, and hopefully we’ll be doing another hackathon sometime next year.”