Skip to main content

Code For Oakland App Competition: Redirectory Wins!




In this tech news, the first annual (hopefully) Code For Oakland hackathon is history. The event drew 102 people, complete with Oakland and San Francisco geeks, and notable non-geeks like AC Transit Board Member and long-time Oakland Piedmont Avenue Activist Chris Peeples, resulted in a number of fascinating and promising applications, all designed with the needs of Oakland's low-income residents and those who aren't well "connected" in mind.


The Saturday, June 4th meetup at Kaiser Center was sparked via the efforts of Oakland Local Founder and Editor Susan Mernitt, and "about 20 people," as Susan explained in the video, who contributed to getting Code For Oakland off the ground.


What's Code For Oakland?


Code For Oakland's mission was simply to have a "one day workshop to build an awesome mobile app." As one of the judges involved in the selection of the winning teams, I can share the criteria we were given to work under, and which were adopted from the Knight Foundation's "Apps For Communities" competition:



1. Make local public information more personalized, useable, and accessible for all.

2. Promote broadband adoption, particularly among Americans who are least likely to be regular Internet users (including low-income, rural, seniors, people with disabilties, and the low-digital, English literacy communities.)

3. Create better links between Americans and services provided by local, State, Tribal, and Federal Governments.

There were a number of interesting and fascinating apps created. Here's the winner's list below, from the Code For Oakland website:



$1500 Ramsell prize:Txt2work, mobile app to allow re-entering prisoners and parolees to search and apply for jobs via their feature phone. Team led by Elise Ackerman and David Chiu.



$500 Ramsell prize for youth,: Betta Stop, mobile app to allow tagging and commenting on quality of bus rides and schedule in Oakland. Team led by Krys Freeman.



$1000 Mozilla prize: Redirectory, platform for allowing mobile feature phone, web and smart phone access to local social services data, focus particularly on parolee and reentry data. Team led by Randall Leeds.



$1000 Pandora prize: OakWatch, mobile/web project to allow real time neighborhood reporting via mobile systems. Team lead by Robbie Trencheny.



$500 Urban Strategies Council–for work with Re-entry Data API prize: Redirectory, platform for allowing mobile feature phone, web and smart phone access to local social services data, focus particularly on parolee and reentry data. Team led by Randall Leeds.



$500 City of Oakland, for work with Oakland files prize: OaklandPM, schema to use social sharing and city & OUSD calendar information to build a mobile tool to let teens find out what after-school activities are available and which friends are going. Team led by Jed Parsons.



$250 Full Court Communications prize: Contxt, mobile service focuses on SMS text messaging: broadcast messaging to community organizers. Team led by Tim Sheiner.



$250 Full Court Communications prize: Oakland Food Finder, mobile/web service for allowing Oakland low-income shoppers (and others) to find out where healthy foods are available in their area and for food supplies (farmers markets, etc.) to broadcast what they have available. Team led by Michael Bernstein.



Addtionally, an in-kind prize from Citizen Space for three months of workspace was provided as a gift for the winners to share.


In the next blog post on Code For Oakland, we'll take a closer look at the winning apps. Meanwhile, Oakland should thank Susan Mernitt and her team.

Comments

Tivon said…
Glad to catch your video. I was on the ComTxt team and I Google'd "Code for Oakland" to check into some coverage. Much appreciate the video you left. Without stuff like that, it's hard to have a good quality tangible explanation of events like this.

- Keith Tivon Gregory
- http://tivon.tv
- @Tivon

Popular posts from this blog

Alex Castro, Electronic Arts VP, Is Oakland’s “Fake Joe Tuman”, “Crocker Mom”

Alex Castro, is currently Vice President Of Product Management At Electronic Arts, and a fairly-well-known and legendary tech executive, regularly quoted in a number of industry publications. But Alex Castro’s also an Oakland resident who has the terrible habit of going online, making traceble email accounts from his Electronic Arts office, and posing as someone […] from WordPress http://ift.tt/1fVkWP9 via IFTTT

Event: Jog For Jill San Francisco Run September 12th Golden Gate Park

Cal Women's Rowing Team member Jill Costello passed away from complications due to lung cancer on June 24th 2010 and at the age of 21. A San Francisco event and run called Jog For Jill has been established and will be held this Sunday, September 12th at 5 PM. Two members of the Cal Women's Crew team were at the Cal vs. Davis football game wearing Jog For Jill shirts, and were kind enough to provide the video interview above. Below are the other details from the event website, where you're encouraged to pre-register here CLICK FOR SITE : Pre-Registration: Online/$25 Day of Registration: 4:00 p.m./$30 Shotgun Start: 5:00 p.m. After run/walk celebration: 6:00 p.m.- 8:30 p.m. Event Location: Golden Gate Park Music Concourse Bandshell S Tea Garden Drive San Francisco, California 94118 Participants are encouraged to pre-register. Only pre-registered participants will be guaranteed a walk/run T-shirt. T-shirts will be limited to the first 2500 day of regis

Oakland Mayor's Race: LWV Forum Draws Oakland's Older Folks

Oakland Mayor's Race Forum first take. (Which means, there's going to be more of these posts on last night, because a lot was happening.) This just in: The Oakland Tribune's out of touch with Oakland. A number of attendees of the 450 estimated said they learned of the Oakland League Of Women Voters via "the newspaper." All of the people who made that statement were over 50 years old. Still, the forum, which attracted every candidate except Dr. Terrance Candell, was a success. The auditorium at 300 Lakeside Drive seats 380 people, so if you do the math, it was about 70 over capacity. The crowd was a happy mix of supporters of candidates and long-time observers of the Oakland political scene. The one complaint they had was there wasn't enough time to hear what the candidates were about. That wasn't because there were too many candidates, but due to the format. Either Oakland Tribune Editor Martin Reynolds or the League of Women Voter