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Shane Shifflett

Gavin Newsom, Joanna Rees, and a roomful of hackers: Summer of Smart continues

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By |June 30, 2011 11:28 a.m. |In Summer of Smart

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Over the weekend, around 50 artists, city planners, journalists and developers gathered on a fifth-floor office space overlooking ramshackle Market and Sixth streets with a single goal: build an interactive project focused on art and community in 48 hours or less.

The hackathon was part of Summer of Smart (#sfSos), a summer-long experiment in urban innovation designed to bring designers, artists and coders together to drum up technical solutions to San Francisco's most pressing social issues using public data. The experiment is the brainchild of The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco-based idea incubator fostering thought around digital culture (The Bay Citizen is a Summer of Smart media partner).

Courtesy of GAFTA

With mayoral candidate Joanna Rees and former-mayor Gavin Newsom stopping in to learn about hackers' projects, Peter Hirshberg, a founding member of GAFFTA, promised that the ideas created here will be heard by City Hall hopefuls.

“Part of the secret of this is if we come up with good ideas there is no doubt the campaigns will steal them,” he said.

After a keynote introduction on Friday evening by John Gage, 21st employee and former Chief Researcher at Sun Microsystems, participants self-organized into teams and dreamt up projects to help develop communities and highlight or create public art. Before sundown on Saturday, seven projects would be ready for demo.

“We're trying to get people excited about taxes,” Heidi Dolamore said, a Mission resident and manager for the Contra Costa Library. Her team of six mostly met for the first time on Saturday and wanted to work with census data to create a tool showing residents how spending choices affected their block. Working through the weekend, they created an app allowing users to allocate tax dollars into various categories, like education and public safety, and simulate the successes and struggles of the block. While playing their demo, I failed to invest in education and I saw messages from students complaining about their test scores.

While listening to presentations on Friday, Margaret McCarthy, an educator at BrightWorks, came up with an idea to make a hyper-local site for volunteering. “There is a big volunteer culture in this city and yet there remains this big gap between the amount of things needed and the amount of getting done,” she said. McCarthy and seven others spent the weekend crafting a matchmaking service to connect projects to volunteers.
Summer of Smart closeup
Courtesy of GAFTA


Harrison Tucker, a 25-year-old Peace Corp volunteer, was driven by an interest in community planning. He arrived with a handful of friends to explore ideas of “interactive public art and how that can serve greater public needs other than the aesthetic.” Tucker and three others described their weekend's endeavor, called The Post, as such: a bulletin board system aggregating images and text submitted within a short geographic region from the display. They described how their project would reduce the number of flyers pasted to telephone poles in neighborhoods like the Mission and increase awareness of individual artwork.

Throughout the day, my eye was continually distracted by a monolithic television sitting near my seat; one of their developers had brought along a huge Internet-enabled Samsung television to demo their project.
If you missed last weekend's code-a-thon you have two more chances to tackle issues like transportation and public health using your favorite web tools. As a media partner, we’ll be there on July 23 and August 20 documenting your inventions and hacking away.

Shane Shifflett
Shane Shifflett is a software developer and reporter who learned how to interrogate data while a story at Northwestern's Medill School. There, he wrote about a drug-addled prostitute's 300th arrest and the unforgiving criminal justice ... View Profile
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