Join Launch League to help shape Akron!

They’re bringing together a bunch of Akron’s tech, business, and design talent with city officials to solve some of the city’s biggest challenges.

Agenda:
8:00a Doors open
8:30a Breakfast and welcome
9:00a Team introductions and project work
12:00p Lunch
5:00p Dinner
7:00p Demo to the City
8:00p Afterparty

How does this all work?
We have a small group of people that are putting together all of the preliminary work for this event. A steering committee planning the event, ordering coffee and food and the like and Project Managers, gathering requirements and determining team needs in advance. The week before, we will work together to put all the volunteers into teams that we feel will be most effective. We will build a list of tentative teams and the day of the event, we’ll have a plan to introduce everyone on each team to the rest of his or her teammates. Of course, we won’t get it all right the first time so we’ll likely move some people around throughout the day.

The first big challenge we will be tackling will be to create an open data API for the city:
After reviewing the list of areas in which the city of Akron has identified opportunities to use technology, we have decided that the best route to take initially is to create a base-layer open data API. What we found is that many of the requests revolve around the standardization and consumption of city data to solve or improve problem situations including: better marketing of the city and privately owned vacant lots, promoting business and other well-known districts, city dashboards with useful metrics, shelter rentals, community learning center rentals, and marketing of the community learning centers. All of those problems can be tackled more efficiently and effectively if we were to have a standard aggregation of open data. Open data is a term that has gotten a lot of traction recently and has many other benefits than just helping us tackle these requested improvements.

The second big challenge we are tackling is neighborhood branding:
From the Center for Community Progress: The purpose of neighborhood marketing is to build a positive image that attracts the desired investments of time, money and energy that support the neighborhood’s revitalization goals. Successful neighborhood marketing is very clear about what it hopes to accomplish, who its target markets are, and the messages that will cultivate the desired response from those target markets.

By solidifying the various neighborhood’s identities and bringing organized neighborhood leadership together we expect this will allow our communities to better engage, attract, and retain residents thus boosting Akron as a whole. For this event, we will be focusing on North Hill and Middlebury.

The third big challenge we are tackling is CLC reservations:
The Akron School System is built around the idea of Community Learning Centers. This means that all Akron Schools are available to the community for use. This is why many of us are able to vote at an Akron school facility. Unfortunately, the CLCs do not have an easy system to allow the community to review the sites, look at the schedule of availability, or reserve a room at a center.

Hack N Akron will have a team that will build out a site that helps expose the availability of the CLCs to the community, making it more likely that people will use these great community resources.

Special projects team:
Attendance permitting, we will be forming special project teams to tackle specific challenges around the city.