The term "civic hacking" can, at times, raise an eyebrow or two. It just so happens that each one of these words packs quite a bit of meaning individually. When you combine them, something magical happens. Let's define them.
civic - adj. -- Of, relating to, or belonging to a city, a citizen, or citizenship.
hacking - v. -- Creating clever modifications or improvements, often using technology.
So "civic hacking" is the act of creating clever modifications and improvements to your city, for the citizens, as an act of your citizenship. What this often ends up looking like is a community of civically-engaged individuals offering their time and talent to create projects that have local impact using open source technologies.
In Indianapolis, civic hackers created a tool to visualize and make sense of police accountability data. It's open source, it's in production with data from two cities, and ready for more communities to jump on board!
This is a perfect example of civic hacking -- community members collaborating with city officials to create something locally impactful and sharing the culmination of that work so others communities can benefit as well.
Civic hacking is made possible by advances in the modern open web, advances in open government and transparency practices, as well as the technical modernization of government. We lean on the work done by so many before us, and are able to do so because of their commitment to making their resources open and reusable.
It should be no surprise that the government collects a very large amount of data. The open data movement is pushing governments to publish as much of that data as they can online in machine readable standardized formats. This allows anyone who's motivated to create things powered by this data.
The data can be visualized, analyzed, made interactive, or even used to power apps that provide useful services. Weather apps are a perfect example of this. Because weather data is collected by the government and made open, many people are able to create different weather-related services.
Code that is "open source" is available to be copied, reused, and modified by others (within certain restrictions determined by the license). The civic hacking and larger open source community has created a plethora of projects that can be used and implemented locally for free!
This allows communities across the world to create and contribute to projects together for the benefit of everyone. Why reinvent the wheel when everyone can make the same wheel better and better all the time?
We're all volunteers here, so having the tools to facilitate the type of workflow we need is very important. We're always working to improve our process and we lean heavily on these tools. All of our projects are on GitHub. Our communication happens on Slack. We also have a page to show all "help-wanted" tasks.
The most important part of civic hacking is the community. We thrive because of amazing people who contribute their time and energy to the work we do. No matter the amount of time, it's counts! It certainly helps that this has to be one of the most interesting ways to flex your civic muscles. There are some really cool things happening in the civic tech world, and it all starts with the people.
Awesome! Make your way over to the onboarding guide for information on how the group operates and how to jump in. If you have any questions or there is something this document has no answered for you, please open an issue and let us know!