On February 19th, some members of our Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation (API), Nico Diaz (Chief Innovation and Data Officer), and Jason Scharf (Data Program Manager) had the pleasure to be part of CuseHacks' 2022 Hackathon. These events generally last somewhere between 24 and 72 hours, where teams break up and compete against each other to create innovative web applications, websites, maps, or design products to help solve different challenges. Some Hackathons have themes and some have different prizes for different categories.
CuseHacks is a Student-run Hackathon put on by Syracuse University students every year. Our API team was very excited at the chance to partner with CuseHacks and help sponsor this event.
During the experience, we met with many students who were interested in using civic data that is stored on the Syracuse Open Data Portal in their applications. Our team was also able to present a break-out session on what Open Data is and how students can access Syracuse’s Open Data Portal.
Some of the topics that we covered were:
Accessing data tables in the portal directly on the webpage.
Making some custom maps in ArcGIS Online through the data portal.
Downloading data as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file, uploading this into Tableau Software to make a basic data visualization.
Using the Application Programming Interface (API) console of individual datasets to show how developers can customize their API calls to only return the data and information that they need for their application.
Two of the teams that won awards in the Hackathon used data from the Syracuse Open Data Portal. One of the teams was Cuse Water. Cuse Water is a web-based project that used the Water Services Dataset, as well as Federal Environmental Working Group (EWG) standards, to provide information about the year that water pipes were installed in Syracuse.
The Cuse Water project was created by Syracuse University Students Zeynep Cakmak, Alejandra Lopez, Allen Soberanes, and Isabella Rosales during Cuse Hacks' 2022 Hackathon. You can read more about their project and view their demonstration video here.
Another project was Car Care for 'Cuse, which is a web-based project that used the Pavement Rating Dataset along with Google Directions programming tool to create a project based on the desire to avoid potholes and treacherous roads when driving.
Care Care for 'Cuse team members (Nicholas Connolly, Katherine Gardner, and Shalamar Brown) with API staff member, Jason Scharf)
This was created by SU Students Katherine Gardner, Nicholas Connolly, and Shalamar Brown. Their project takes an input of a start and end address in Syracuse, obtaining the route via the Google Directions API, and calculating the average road quality across the trip. You can read more about their project and see their demonstration video here.
As a local government, we do not have all of the answers or solutions. Part of what makes an open government so transformative is that as a government, we can provide the building blocks (data) to look under the hood at different problems. However, it is only as residents, students, activists, hackers, and government officials come together, can we really wrap our heads around the challenge and start to come up with some innovative ways to help solve community needs. At the API team, we greatly look forward to continuing to collaborate with the community. If you have any ideas on how your organization can partner with us, please reach out to us at opendata@syrgov.net.