Bring your ideas and skills to Sacramento County’s first-ever Hack4Sac event and help develop new solutions that will improve customer service and help residents and businesses access our services. The six-week project will bring talent together with ideas and real-life needs of residents; invited are community advocates, business owners, residents, coders, developers, writers, analysts, graphic designers and innovators.
Sacramento County is partnering with Code for Sacramento, a Code for America brigade, eRepublic’s Center for Digital Government, and the Sacramento Area Council for Government to bring this Hack4Sac event.
“We very much want to involve the community in creating apps and concepts for future development that will bring real value to people and businesses by making our services and data more efficient and accessible,” said Board of Supervisors Chair Roberta MacGlashan.
Join Us for the Kickoff
Please join us for the kickoff meeting on March 1, 6-9 p.m., at 700 H Street, Board Chambers where we’ll outline the project’s vision, review the data that the County generates, and gather information from businesses, residents and the coders about what kinds of apps or solutions would be helpful. An example of an app that was developed uses County restaurant inspection data to allow anyone to look up the health inspection history of any restaurant in Sacramento.
County Chief Information Officer Rami Zakaria, said, “The event encourages the community to use open data sets to help create innovative solutions to make our lives easier and improve business and government operation.”
The Hack4Sac Challenge aims to combine people’s ideas with IT specialists and Sacramento County’s Open Data to create a software app or concept that addresses a community need during the 6-week competition. Teams will form from technical and non-technical participants and winning teams will have a chance to win cash prizes for first, second and third place: $5,000; $3,000; and $2,000.
At the end of the six weeks, teams will present their solutions and be judged on:
1. Innovation and creativity behind the solution
2. User-friendliness, usability, and accessibility of the solution
3. Feasibility and sustainability of implementing the final solution
4. Applicability to Sacramento County and use of Open Data sets
The event is open to the public, however, County employees and their immediate family members may not compete for prizes, but may participate as volunteers. Teams may consist of one or more persons.
Want to attend?
Register for the March 1 kick-off event!
Want more information?
Check out the Hack4Sac website!