Hacking for Good - Lessons from Joplin Hackathon

Hacking for Good & Community Engagement Joplin, MO Underwritten By

GovLoop, 734 15th St. NW, Suite 500 Washington, D.C. 20005

/Joplin Hackathon

About Joplin Hackathon Joplin is a city of 50,000 in the southwest corner of Missouri.

On May 22, 2011, Joplin was struck by an extremely powerful EF-5 tornado, resulting in at least 161 deaths and more than 900 injuries. Joplin also experienced extensive damage to critical infrastructure that provides much needed services to citizens, total destruction of thousands of houses, and severe damage to numerous apartments and businesses. St. John’s Medical Center and multiple school buildings were damaged by the tornado.

Over the last year, the Joplin community has come together to repair its city. Since the tornado struck, over 135,000 volunteers have been logged and nearly 15,000 volunteers have come to Joplin from across the globe to work on projects. During the tornado, the citizens of Joplin relied on the city website and Facebook page for alerts. The IT staff had to handle content in seven different sites, and provide mobile access, as most citizens did not have internet access.

From April 27 through April 29, the City of Joplin and CivicPlus hosted the Joplin Hackathon to work on rebuilding Joplin’s tech infrastructure. Using crisis management lessons learned from the tornado and a year of rebuilding, the city had a list of needs for a more modern web infrastructure. Michael Ashford, Community Engagement Evangelist, CivicPlus, stated, “The City of Joplin has dedicated their resources to managing a complex cluster of seven websites to meeting the demands of fourteen city departments, including the fire, police and public works departments.”

from University of Missouri, Southwest Baptist University, and Manhattan, Kansas in the categories of design, community engagement, and emergency management.

One of the hackers for the event, Tabitha Jarvis who is a sophomore at Southwest Baptist University, Bolivar, Missouri, stated, “When I think of government, I thought it was really high up. Now, I see through Joplin that government really wants to communicate with its community, that they really want to hear from the people who live here and find out what’s best for the city.”

Michael Ashford built on Tabitha’s sentiment, stating, “Our expertise in local government website solutions provides the backbone of our donation to the City of Joplin, but the Hackathon is our way of engaging the region’s talent to contribute toward a best practice web site that can serve as a model of community engagement for communities around the country and around the world.”

During the Hackathon, nine teams competed over the weekend to help create the digital townhall for City of Joplin. After forty-eight hours of brainstorming, designing, and developing, the projects were finished and presented to the judges. After tough deliberation, the judges awarded prizes to participants

Based in Manhattan, Kansas, CivicPlus has designed over 1,100 local government websites that serve nearly 42 million citizens throughout North America. Civic Plus was recently acknowledge as a recipient of the Center for Digital Government’s Best Fit Integrator Award for delivering extraordinary digital solutions to public IT projects. CivicPlus transforms municipal websites into powerful two-way communication platforms that lets citizens talk to and participate in local government. For more information visit the CivicPlus website.

/ Joplin Hackathon

Hackathon Lessons

There are many approaches to creating a city hackathon but here are three key characteristics that I was really impressed with during the Joplin Hackathon.

Engage with City Leaders It is really important when working on any innovative project to get buy-in from leadership who would use the new tools.

Before the event, CivicPlus spent time with the City of Joplin and worked on developing city requirements that they provided for all the teams. They varied from use cases, specific examples of other sites they liked, and process flows.

Many of the developers on the teams either were personally there during the Joplin tornado or had family members that were there. Thus, they developed use cases based on citizen needs, whether it was how they had trouble tracking down family members or remembering that phone calls weren’t working so they had to rely on text.

I was particularly impressed with the level of buy-in at the City of Joplin. Both the city PIO and city IT leader were not only at the kick-off and closing events but literally stayed throughout the weekend. They stopped by groups, attended meals, and shared their interest.

Additionally, a number of other city leaders played large roles.

The incoming mayor spoke at the kick-off while current mayor spoke at the closing award ceremony. City officials from fire, police, and recreation departments stopped by throughout the weekend to provide content suggestions for their sections.

Additionally, teams actually walked the city and talked to potential users. I was particularly impressed with the team from Southern Baptist University. They spent two hours the first night walking the streets of Joplin talking to a wide range of citizens from youth to elderly, working to identify what there main issues were with how the city uses technology.

Engage with Citizens When you are building tools to engage with citizens, it is amazing how often city officials and developers forget to actually talk to the citizens of the area.

Give Structured Freedom Too much structure limits creativity. No guidance and it becomes hard to know where to start. I liked the structured freedom provided in the hackathon. There were three categories of winners – design, community engagement, and emergency management. The categories were broad enough that teams could come up with a range of solutions but focused enough to give guidance.

Three Lessons for Running a Hackathon • Engage With City Leaders • Engage With Citizens • Give Structured Freedom

Teams were provided with pre-reading materials that allowed some preparation of ideas but the real magic happened at the event during crunch time.

“This Hackathon is truly amazing. So much is being done in so little time – I’ve been maintaining 7 websites housing all this content and now, we’ll be able to house it all within one website with various departments being empowered to manage their respective areas of content – from an administrative perspective as well as from a citizen feedback perspective,”

- Mark Morris, Director, Information Systems City of Joplin

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/ Joplin Hackathon

Why Hackathons Matter The impact of hackathons can be huge. Over the weekend, it was so impressive talking to the IT director at the City of Joplin. I especially found it interesting listening to his stories of how he has worked really hard to make the city technology as great as it could be, but he is one person and it is impossible to do everything.

ernment websites, ranging from frequency of content updates to digital communication tools, online services, and advanced community engagement portals. When assessment is complete, information is aggregated and a stage of digital community engagement is assigned with recommendations on how to reach the next step of engagement.

You could truly feel the impact of the hackathon when he made a moving speech where he choked up and discussed how everyone had made an impact in the future of city of Joplin.

The purpose of rankings like this for me is to provide a basic gauge – it shows roughly who is doing digital engagement well and it provides a mechanism to celebrate those excelling. Also, rankings produce an incentive for those at the bottom of the scale to focus attention on digital engagement to craft a strategy to move forward.

It was powerful to see that building technology infrastructure that helps the city is just as an important volunteer task as handing out food or rebuilding homes. A modern communication infrastructure isn’t just nice to have, but essential.

As CivicPlus Vice President Jesse Manning noted: citizens everywhere are demanding better engagement with their local governments but “Quantifying a community’s level of engagement on the web poses a challenge to government staff,” said Manning. Like any survey, there can be debates if the questions are perfect or the scale is 100% foolproof, but the important part is it starts a conversation within an agency, between citizens and agency about community engagement.

“My favorite part of this event is having the opportunity to serve. I didn’t have any other way to help Joplin so this Hackathon was a nice way to help out. Through CivicPlus, I learned that a lot of governments are using new technology to reach out to its citizens, and after talking with citizens on Friday night, we heard they wanted a way of getting information quickly – that inspired us to create our pop-up windows with important messages that citizens could either close or click on for more information.”

- Rachel Johnston, Junior at Southwest Baptist University Future of Community Engagement The future of community engagement is finding new ways to provide citizens a way to engage with their citizens. For hundreds of years, governments have solicited feedback from its citizens – now the trick is learning how to engage during a time when technology is rapidly evolving from Facebook to text messaging to YouTube and more.

In times of shrinking budgets, community engagement can be easy to cut. Community engagement is essential to any wellrun democracy. By getting buy-in and feedback early on from citizens, we get better solutions and better run cities.

GovLoop’s mission is simple: connect government to improve government. We aim to inspire public sector professionals by acting as the knowledge network for government.

That’s why I’m excited by the new Digital Community Engagement Scorecard launched this week by CivicPlus, which helps municipalities and counties gauge the effectiveness of their current online communications and learn what steps they can take to achieve higher levels of community engagement.

GovLoop serves more than 50,000 members by helping them to foster collaboration, learn from each other, solve problems and advance in their government careers. The GovLoop community has been widely recognized across the public sector -- federal, state local, industry and academia -- as a leading site for addressing public sector issues.

The Digital Community Engagement Scorecard starts the dialogue for measuring digital engagement by having a 1-6 scorecard of stages of digital community engagement based on a series of questions that explore various elements of their gov-

GovLoop is the largest government niche network of its kind and boasts an extremely engaged membership that create or comment on nearly 1,000 blog posts and discussion forums every month.

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