What Happened?
The National League of Cities announced a new innovation campaign involving 25 communities looking to spur innovation in the private sector. The campaign builds off the traditional hackathon model and expands to empower more communities across the country.
Goal
The Multi-City Innovation Campaign is designed to provide 25 communities with a developer ecosystem to spur continual, sustainable innovation. The goal is to equip participating communities with the tools and expertise to build scalable, long-term solutions that will change the way cities communicate with residents as well as improve information sharing to connect citizens to public resources.
While each city’s problems and populations are unique, many municipalities are facing common challenges when trying to innovate and improve overall efficiency. The 25 communities can partner with industry experts and developers to experiment with new technologies and share their findings with other city leaders.
According to the campaign’s organizers, the event is designed to act as a hackathon but on a larger scale with potential to create more long-term solutions. While local hackathons help communities solve finite problems, the multi-city campaign aims to incentivize government innovation that can be applied to a wider ecosystem of localities. With limited budgets, cities are often restrained in their innovation investments. The collaborative approach will help communities build off each other’s findings and successes.
Partnering cities will provide $5,000 each to the winning technology selected to be deployed in its community, for a total of up to $120,000. Applicants can then submit their solutions to the 2015 Jumpstart Foundry cohort over the summer to compete for a 14-week startup program and $100,000 in seed capital.
Local Level
There are local-level hackathons being held continually throughout the year in locations nationwide. These events have themes for the specific types of challenges the solutions should work to overcome. Many focus on a specific sector in need of improvement such as transportation, healthcare, education or communication.
The popularity of hackathons has increased significantly, and spurred competitions between developer teams from colleges and universities across the country. The hackathon events attract tech-savvy students to work with local agencies and community groups to solve problems in a real-world setting. These events not only help solve local government inefficiencies, but also provide experience and skills training for students preparing for professional careers.
Global Scale
Taking the basics of a hackathon a step further, NASA and IBM are hosting the fourth annual space apps hackathon that takes place in more than 135 locations across the world. The goal of the global hackathon is to generate new ideas from outside the major tech and science institutions to improve space exploration, climate change and other challenges presented worldwide.
The Space App Challenge will bring together technologists, designers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs and community leaders to design innovative solutions to address global challenges with public data and new technologies. The event aims to produce relevant, open-source solutions to more than 25 challenges in four main areas:
- Earth
- Outer space
- Humans
- Robotics
The initiative is designed to launch an international effort to combat global problems with diverse, scalable solutions.
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