The City of Philadelphia is one of the cities from across the country and around the world taking part in the Google Places API Developer Challenge.
And Philly wants you – yeah, you! – to help build an app through this developer challenge to connect Philadelphians to their government, and their community.
PhillyRising, an initiative of the City’s Managing Director’s office, is built on the idea of collaboration – government collaborating with citizens and community leaders to improve the quality of life in city neighborhoods.
Philadelphia is now taking this idea of collaboration to the civic hacking community, calling on developers to help build a mobile application that can provide city residents with important information on their government and their neighborhoods.
The goal of the effort is to leverage the talents of the Code for America Brigade and other passionate and talented Philadelphians to help realize the vision for a mobile app that supports the effort of the PhillyRising program.
The following video of City of Philadelphia Managing Director Rich Negrin provides more insight into what the city hopes to accomplish by reaching out to developers.
Additional information on the city’s app idea for the Google Challenge can be found here.
The Google Places API is a powerful resource to build location based apps, and to provide rich information on the places of interest in a city. Developers can pair this powerful resource with the data that Philadelphia has made available through the OpenDataPhilly.org data portal and build an app that can change the face of a community.
Under the direction of the CfA Brigade in Philadelphia, a series of “hack nights” are being held at the Devnuts hackerspace in Northern Liberties – every Tuesday night at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time starting on October 9 and running through the end of the month. Submissions to the Google Challenge are due by October 31.
In addition, the hope for this effort is that the app built for Philadelphia as part of the Google challenge will have broad applicability in cities across the country.
“If we can develop this app in this way, and have it be such an important resource for connecting people with their government and each other…that can apply anywhere.”
– Rich Nergin, Deputy Mayor for Administration & Managing Director, City of Philadelphia
Building an app for Philadelphia is just the first step – the hope is to take this app to every city with a CfA Brigade.
Sign up for the Google Places API Developer Challenge and help build the next great civic app – for Philadelphia, and beyond.
