Some Ideas To Hack On at BARcamp This Year
BARcamp is only a week away! If you’re looking for something fun to hack on over the weekend, here are a few things that I’ve found recently that look exciting:
Apps For Metro Chicago Competition
We invite software developers, community groups, businesses and individuals to build apps that solve problems and improve services in Metro Chicago. Our goal in this three-phased competition is to increase government transparency by facilitating the building of software applications that are creative, useful, and designed for long-term impact.
Apps for Metro Chicago, Illinois is the first apps competition to be a collaborative effort among four governmental agencies. The City of Chicago, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Cook County, and the State of Illinois are together providing an exceptional amount of open data, an unprecedented amount of technical assistance and unique efforts to help software developers team up with community organizations to build useful apps.
Geoffrey Hing is a developer for the Metro Chicago Information Center and will be in attendance to talk about this contest. The prizes are pretty good and a strong submission could gain you some notoriety and help make your city a nicer place to live.
FabFi Long Range WiFi Links
FabFi link in Afganhistan
FabFi is an open-source, FabLab-grown system using common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles. With Fabfi, communities can build their own wireless networks to gain high-speed internet connectivity—thus enabling them to access online educational, medical, and other resources.
This is a low cost, long range internet link system that is in use in nations with poor infrastructure to connect people to the internet. Building a link like this would be impressive; contributing something back to the project would be amazing. And if the internet isn’t working well during the weekend …
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KarmaKorn is looking for hackers and designers who want to help build a #GoodSpotting game to help take the existing cash-for-causes contest model to the next level.
Contests like Pepsi Refresh and Chase the Good have donated a lot of money to the winning nonprofits, but they suffer from 3 fundamental design flaws:
1) Their system of voting for nonprofits is meaningless. An empty vote does nothing to advance the mission of the cause except for trying to help them win. What a wasted opportunity. Instead, we can have some kind of meaningful action count as a “vote” in the contest.
2) Their winner-takes-all system for awarding the cash prizes distorts nonprofit behavior and creates a poorly engineered incentive-disincentive dilemma for participating nonprofits: Do we think we can win? If so, go all out. If not, stop participating.
3) The combination of 1) & 2) results in an erosion of social capital for participating nonprofits, instead of an increase in their social capital. They relentlessly flog their lists trying to scour meaningless votes to win the cash prize — basically, a spam-like activity. This wears on the good will, patience and attention span of their fans and supporters, while doing nothing for these key people or for the nonprofits themselves.
We have conceived a better way to run these contests/games, and would like to find hackers and designers to help us build the first one.