Read our latest participant email for more info

When:

June 2, 2018 – sign up!

Where:

CitySpace (address)

What:

Smart Cville and WillowTree are hosting Charlottesville’s second civic innovation day. Community members from diverse backgrounds will gather to consider how technology can help mitigate specific challenges in our community – sign up!

View the 2017 event page.

Who:

Designers, programmers, citizen activists, technologists, YOU – sign up!

Code for America has developed an anti-harassment policy for this type of event. We intend to use it as a guide to ensure our event remains positive, welcoming, and accepting.

Why:

We believe that combining technology and human expertise we can improve our community. Central Virginia is home to a highly educated and active citizenry that should be engaged deeply to help make our community a better place to live.

Project Fellows Program:

Each challenge will be supported by a project fellow.  This participant will serve as a facilitator and project manager for the challenge during and after the event.  The project fellow applications go live on February 1 and are due March 1.  For more information about the Project Fellow Program see here.

Project Fellow team lead: Taylor Erwin, Analytics Architect, WillowTree

Lunch Speaker:

During our lunch, we will hear from Megan Juelfs, Chief Data Officer, Thriving Cities Group.  Megan has spent more than a decade collecting, analyzing, and presenting data. She directed the development of the Indicator Explorer, which uses data and to help community residents, leaders, and practitioners assess, understand, and ultimately improve  neighborhoods and cities.

Presenting sponsor:


Event Sponsors:

Food sponsors:

Bodo’s Bagels, Womble Bond Dickinson (coffee)

Challenges

Regional Transit Challenge (Sponsors: JAUNT, CAT, UTS)

Charlottesville Area Transit, JAUNT and the University Transit System all provide transit services to the region. Each entity has a specific focus for their service, and some overlap occurs at the edge of each service area. How can we create a platform for current and potential transit passengers to know what service options are available, and how to best access the services?

Project fellow: Nathan Day will be the lead facilitator for this challenge. Nate works for HemoShear Therapeutics building tools and pipelines to analyze drug discovery data. He enjoys applying himself to civic data because it keeps him learning new skills that can ultimately help the community make better data-driven decisions.

Rio+29 Challenge (Sponsor: Albemarle County Development Services)

Albemarle County is currently working on a Small Area Plan to revitalize the Rio+29 area as a connected, mixed-use community. This area is filled with incredible history, but it’s currently buried under big boxes and asphalt – how might we leverage technology to bring that history back to life, create avenues for “authentic” citizen engagement and feedback, and inform future design and community identity?

Project Fellow: Jillian Regan, consultant at Rillian, enjoys combining her experience in data analysis, population health research, and quality improvement to find innovative ways to improve the community and engage multiple stakeholders in the process.

CFD Challenge (Sponsor: City of Charlottesville Fire Department)

The Charlottesville Fire Department regularly assesses fire risks to life and property. With dozens of economic, building stock, demographic, and lifestyle data sets relevant to assessing fire risk available, creating a model to integrate myriad data into a parcel-level assessment will allow dynamic and ongoing monitoring of shifting fire risks in the community. How might we build a model that integrates current and novel data sources into actionable fire risk insights regularly available to local experts in the fire service?

Project fellow: Benjamin Skinner will be the lead facilitator for this challenge. Benjamin is a research assistant professor of education at the University of Virginia where he uses quantitative methods to study policies and practices that support college access and completion. A proponent of open-source models, Ben has written packages for the R and Python languages and freely shares both scripts and teaching materials through GitHub.