By Mary Velan
Gov1
California is dealing with the effects of environmental change and drought, spurring the government to find innovative ways to reduce waste in resources and increase sustainable practices. To find solutions to these problems, California recently hosted a code-a-thon to bring together community stakeholders and inspire innovative thinking.
The Contest
As part of the Innovation Contest (AB 2138- Gatto), the Government Operations Agency and the Department of General Services are looking for innovative solutions that will help California improve its sustainable operations and engage with the public. The state also wants residents to pilot the Statewide Open Data Portal and use publicly available data sources to help citizens and decision makers understand the state’s progress on achieving sustainability goals and to help policymakers and implementers inside state government make informed decisions. Thus, the code-a-thon was launched.
The GreenGov code-a-thon brought together government officials, software engineers and amateur programmers to work together to find solutions to the state’s challenges. Drawing at least one data set available through the pilot Statewide Open Data Portal, the code-a-thon focused on creating apps, visualizations, and other tools that can help improve government sustainability practices. One of the identified problems throughout state government is finding better ways to share and disseminate the large amount of data maintained by government agencies. Therefore, contestants were asked to harness and visualize data sets to empower citizens and policy makers with data that will lead to better informed policy and implementation decisions.
Visually engaging sustainability tools could include dashboards that:
- Report departments’ progress toward established sustainability goals
- Incorporate as many of the data sets provided as possible, as well as other publicly available information
- Automatically update as data sets in the data portal are updated
The winners of the code-a-thon received the following awards:
- $10,000 1st place
- $7,500 2nd place
- $5,000 3rd place
- $2,500 People’s Choice
The winning team developed a solution to track how state agencies are performing when it comes to buying greener, environmentally preferable products to serve the citizens of California. The team’s Green Buyer program links state department purchase order data with Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) contract data to ensure managers and the public have transparent information regarding state department purchases. The goal of the solution is to help public agency staff improve on their department’s performance and meet EPP purchasing goals.
The winning projects were judged on a variety of factors such as:
- Effective use of data sets from the GreenGov open data portal and other sources
- Innovation and creativity
- User-friendliness
- Usability and interface
- Feasibility of implementation
Green Buyer and other winning projects will discuss further development and draft up implementation plans in the near future.
The code-a-thon was established as a result of Assembly Bill 2138, which created a contest to provide an opportunity for Californians to share ways to improve state government. This bill required Governor Brown to designate three state agencies to participate in a pilot program in 2015 to award cash prizes to eligible participants in innovation contests; known as 25K Find a New Way.