As South by Southwest Interactive grows, so does the difficulty of trying to encapsulate the annual conference. And while onlookers can and , one burgeoning area with real world applications is civic apps and hacks.
Simply put, civic apps take publicly available data 鈥� anything from crime statistics to restaurant inspection scores 鈥� and mashes them up with applications like maps, making them accessible to the smartphone set. The biggest example , a national non-profit that works with cities to develop meaningful data applications.
鈥淟ast year, 2012, was really the first time we saw civic hacking and civic coding present at South By,鈥� says Chip Rosenthal. This year, the Austin-based software contractor and consultant hosted a civic hacking meetup as part of SXSW Interactive.
He says SXSW 2012 鈥渃oincided with a time where City of Austin was involved with .鈥� The result was , an app that keeps residents apprised of wildfire conditions and issues checklists of tasks residents can use to lower their wildfire risk.
But back to SXSW 2013: A City of Austin-hosted hackathon, held in conjunction with mapping tech group is already netting results. With just four hours to work, developers created a smartphone app plotting the city鈥檚 that plays the sound of a barking dog barking whenever a user gets close to one such animal. And second and third place apps plotted restaurant inspection score data on a map. An Esri spokesperson says the apps will go live in about a week.
鈥淲hen you have a short time period to create something, with a team you've never worked with before, the results are often clever and interesting,鈥� Esri Director of R&D Amber Case says in a statement. 鈥淪ometimes these ideas showcase important problems that can be solved with open datasets.鈥�
It鈥檚 an assessment that Rosenthal shares. 鈥淩ather than being this kind of theoretical, leading edge thing, this is something that more cities are doing, Austin absolutely one of them.鈥�
