Indy Civic Hackathon Announces Winners

Indy Chamber News Archives

June 23, 2015 (INDIANAPOLIS) – Innovators from across Central Indiana were recognized this evening at The Platform in downtown Indianapolis as the winners of #IndyCivicHack, the second event of the Hack Indiana Series powered by the Indy Chamber and Techpoint. 

Participating teams met for a full-day hackathon on Saturday, June 6 at Eleven Fifty Coding Academy. Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS), the City of Indianapolis, and the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) all posed challenges to the region’s top coders and developers in an effort to highlight the use of technology for civic good.

A maximum of three teams were chosen as finalists for each of the challenges to continue application development for another week beyond the June 6 event to provide a more complete solution to the challenging organizations. The winners of each challenge are listed below.

City of Indianapolis #1: Heatmap Reinvestment Challenge
Winner: Cleaver Designs
Prioritization of public and private investment dollars for community revitalization is important to the future of the Indy region. Cleaver Designs created the ReIndy platform to determine the most viable application of these funds by calculating reinvestment scores for properties based on key metrics, includingwalkability, location and more.

City of Indianapolis #2: Streamlined Vendor Challenge
Winner: Hackers4Hope
The Department of Code Enforcement posed a challenge to consolidate and improve communication with its vendors. Enter the CARE App (Community Asset Rehab Engine), designed by Hackers4Hope to reduce cycle time and significantly improve efficiency in vendor management.

IPS #1: Access to Education Challenge
Winner: Lesson.ly Llamas
IPS identified a challenge in the workflow for families to apply to its magnet schools. The Lesson.ly Llamas created a more transparent, simple platform that not only allows a family to track the progress of their application, but includes an IPS employee portal to track interactions with families so that questions covered in previous calls or emails are archived and quickly reviewable.

IPS #2: Mobile Efficiency Challenge
Winner: HacksviaXtern
Working to solve the challenge of improving IPS mileage reimbursements, HacksviaXtern developed Trackr. With a mobile application for drivers and web application for supervisors, information on driving routes is automatically sent for approvals, thus limiting errors on reports and eliminating tedious paper submissions.

FSSA: Family Self-Service Challenge
Winner: HooCares
The FSSA Division of Family Resources (DFR) consists of 104 local offices serving over 1 million clients in food stamp, cash assistance, and Medicaid programs throughout the State of Indiana. HooCares created the StepUp platform to improve efficiency in the check-in process, workflow and key task functionality.

In addition to its inclusion in the Hack Indiana Series, #IndyCivicHack serves as a regional event for Code for America’s National Day of Civic Hacking. More information on this series can be found at techpoint.org.

About the Hack Indiana Series

The Hack Indiana Series, powered by Techpoint and the Indy Chamber, is an extended hackathon designed to invigorate an entrepreneurial culture and equip participants with marketable skills while encouraging relationship formation and camaraderie across states. The Challenge will engage students and professionals already actively contributing to the Indiana tech space and will potentially lead to seeding new ventures and job-creators.

The Hack Indiana Series is sponsored by the following organizations: AT&T Indiana, Indiana Interactive, Interactive Intelligence, KSM Consulting, SAP, iLAB, Kronos, Netlogx, Perscio, Socrata, Ball State University, Indiana University, IUPUI, The University of Notre Dame, Purdue University, and the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. In-kind sponsors include Launch Fishers, The Speak Easy, The Bureau, Local Initiatives Support Corporations of Indianapolis, and Eleven Fifty Coding Academy.