Dax Okonkwo-Reyes 
Community gardens get city approval through a land-use permission, not a casual handshake: you file with the city’s planning or parks department, staff review the application for completeness against local zoning rules, and a planning commission or city council votes to authorize the use of a specific parcel. The route, the permit type and the … Read more
To prepare for your first hackathon as a beginner, you do three things before the clock starts: pick one narrow problem instead of a broad theme, get your local dev environment running so you are not debugging setup at hour three, and rehearse a two-minute story about your idea. A hackathon is a timeboxed sprint, … Read more
To build a civic tech app from scratch, you narrow one public problem to a single user and task, co-design it with the people affected, pull the relevant open government data through a portal API, ship a thin version in a few weeks, and plan who maintains it before launch. Most of the work happens … Read more
Disaster recovery plans are tested by deliberately exercising them and then measuring what actually happened against the targets the organisation committed to: walkthroughs, tabletop exercises, simulations, technical failover and restore drills, and full-scale field exercises. A test that ends with everyone agreeing the plan looks fine proves nothing. A real test breaks something on purpose, … Read more
Noise complaints are mapped by turning a phone call, app report or web form into a geocoded 311 service request record with a category, a status and an assigned city agency. That record gets dispatched, inspected and closed, and then plotted as a point on a hotspot map. Here is how noise complaints are mapped … Read more
To win a hackathon with a small team, pick one real problem, build one user workflow that works end to end, and spend about a fifth of your hours on the demo and pitch rather than on code. Depth on a single idea beats a wide feature list, and a demo that never crashes beats … Read more
Smart city technology is a connected network of sensors, meters, cameras, software and civic apps that a city uses to collect data about how urban services actually work, analyze it centrally, and adjust services such as traffic signals, street lighting, parking, energy, water and waste in near real time. The goal is fewer guesses and … Read more
To plan a hackathon from start to finish, work backwards from one measurable outcome and follow a fixed sequence: define the goal, pick a format and dates, design the challenges, assemble the organizer team, budget it, confirm venue and tooling, recruit and onboard people, publish the judging rubric, then run the event and follow up … Read more
Yes, most cities have an API, and using one is far less mysterious than the documentation pages suggest. To learn how to use a city API for the first time, you find your city’s open data portal, pick one dataset, send a single GET request from a terminal, and read the JSON that comes back. … Read more