Urbapps, now what? Contests, hackathons and urban mobile technologies

I keep counting some things fromUrbApps. I commented a few days ago that the orientation that we wanted to give at the launch wanted to avoid the competitive factor that some of the projects that are a reference for us have and that take the form of a contest. Without ruling out this possibility, which requires greater complexity, we are now more interested in exploring the interaction between people who want to work in the world of the relationship between mobile applications and the improvement of cities. As David often comments, moving on a fine line between two worlds (that of the code and that of civic action on participation or environmental issues, for example) that do not usually meet. In fact, I come more from that second field, but more and more I feel the need to enter into interaction with other fields. And we assume that in the opposite direction there may also be interest. This mixture in the Valladolid workshop worked very well and was understood.

With more logistical capacity, in the coming months we will try to make the leap to make these meetings more intense and move on to the application development phase with multi-day meetings, following formats that interest us. It is surely Summer of Smart one of the projects that They are more similar to what we want to do from now on, since it combines the development part well with the work of giving context to mobile applications and solutions that have a social sense in the urban environment. Or the more recent Reinvent Green Hackathon in New York or the UP Singapore< /strong> starting this week. Other meetings, although also focused on local venues (as in Buenos Aires, Ottawa or Sydney, to give just a few examples of hackathons and similar formats), focus more on the part development, code and programming. Organize a multi-day meeting where we can contribute from different profiles to understand the power that citizens can have from their mobile devices to create solutions, to reuse public data or to promote self-organization processes that have urban significance. A meeting where both the quality of the code and the civic sense that the applications can reinforce are important.