Civic Celerator Launch

Civic*Celerator is a series of workshops and events, culminating with a demo day, to develop user friendly applications (apps) that can provide relevant information about political candidates and the amounts and sources of their financial support to voters and prospective voters. These apps will leverage the resource of open data made available by the Hawaii Campaign Spending Commission as well as other open government data repositories like legislative data, precinct data, etc.

Be a part of this growing movement…

Who: Coders, designers, developers, entrepreneurs, civic innovators and engaged citizens. Besides contributing much-needed civic applications to the public, the Celerator also brings together people from all aspects of the community. Because the vast majority of civic apps are meant to inform and guide the public, Common Cause and Hawaii Open Data believe that it’s important to involve the public in the development process to ensure that these applications have a broad public appeal. Celerators are specifically designed to let the public participate in the app development process and to further increase their understanding of the civic topics they engage with.

What: Workshops, Meetups and Demo Day
When: January 2014 (kickoff) – April 2014 (Demo Day)
Why: To create cools apps to help build understand of campaign spending data and the political process.

We’ll support the effort with…

  • APIs, data sets and SMEs from the State Campaign Spending Commission
  • Demonstrations of available APIs, workshops on data and mapping
  • Food and drink during the workshops and demo day
  • Lots of cool SWAG
  • Lots of awesome incentives
  • Ample opportunity for developers to meet, collaborate, and demonstrate their technical and business prowess in front of enthusiastic Demo Day attendees
  • An industry-leading judging panel

Sponsored by: Voqal, Common Cause Hawaii, Hawaii Open Data, High Tech Development Corporation and others.