August 1, 2012 - Civic Hacker Award

August 1, 2012 - Mark Scheel was part of an award winning team at a civic hacking event in Denver, CO this weekend, supported by White House staff and local government agencies.

Powered by food trucks, caffeine, and positive energy the team built Rad Routes, a tool for citizens to rate the quality of bike paths in and around Denver. The crowd sourced data is fed back to government agencies to make data-based decisions about upcoming resource allocations. The event was called Colorado Code For Communities, it was put on by PlaceMatters, at Uncubed.

The team consisted of an employee from DRCOG, a GIS PhD candidate from Iran, a web developer, a startup founder who just moved to Boulder, and Mark.

"Two projects were selected as winners with prizes, and we were selected as the second team. The accolade was nothing compared with the great positive energy, the comraderie, and the learning experience" said Mark Scheel president of Digital Construction.

Mark's major technical contribution was designing a database back end and middle ware pieces that powered a responsive-design web app. His architecture allowed customizable visualizations of the crowd-sourced data stored in the back end. API calls are authenticated using OAuth2.0.

"We were stuck and could not get this piece to work, it wasn't quick, but late Saturday night Mark figured out how to do it and completed it by Sunday afternoon" said Jeremy Thiesen, a startup founder and Rad Routes team member.

The event was reported on by local media in this article: Secret street map data, risky cycling routes best Denver civic hackathon

"Governments crave this type of data to make more informed decisions. They have this for automobiles, but now there is an effective tool for bicycle measurement, and they always say, 'what gets measured, gets done'", said Justin Lewis, from DRCOG.

Team Members Jeremy Thiesen, Mark Scheel and Michael Lockwitz hack away, not pictured: Justin Lewis and Mehdi Heris.

Know a way we can make the world better with programming? Let us know and Contact Us! We'd sure appreciate more opportunities to give back.