National Day of Civic Hacking

5/31/13
OpenHack + IC Animal Shelter

Our goal is to build a cute and fuzzy Animal App (think ADOPT MEEE!!!) for the animal shelter here in town. See a cat or dog at the shelter that you really like ? What if you could put your own funny caption on it's picture and share on your Facebook, Twitter, etc ? Your own personal LOLCats !!!

We are writing this cute/silly/fuzzy app to help increase the adoption rate of animals from the shelter. Cats in particular don't get adopted as often as dogs. All the data is there so lets see what we can put together during this National Day of Civic Hacking. This is an all volunteer effort. We even have server space donated by Heroku! Public invited - Sunday 1pm - 4pm downtown IC

Also there will be the usual Hardware experts around for those who want to talk robot tech. We will have an EggBot to show off as well. Bring your hard-boiled eggs and we will unleash the EggBot upon them!

Update (2103/05/31):

We're excited to have this next OpenHack as a part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. Essentially, it will be the same as any other OpenHack (Sunday, 1-4pm), but we'll have at least one civic-oriented project for people to work on if they'd like. Otherwise, you're free to bring whatever you'd like and just come hang out with other local techies. :)

Update (2013/05/28): We're planning to work on a small web app for the Iowa City Animal Center. It would be great if you'd like to help out, but you can work on whatever you'd like if you attend. We've already gotten some code up on GitHub, if you want to get started early. (https://github.com/OpenHackIC/animal_center)

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Original post:

We’re excited that our next OpenHack will be part of the National Day of Civic Hacking (http://hackforchange.org/). It will be taking place on Sunday, June 2nd (and possibly the preceding Saturday, June 1st).

Since that doesn't fit in our normal “3rd Sunday of the month” schedule, we've decided not to meet on May 19th (tomorrow). This also makes sense because it’s a busy graduation weekend for the University of Iowa, and the weather on May 19th isn't supposed to be very good either.

So, for now, please hang onto your hacking energy and bring it along during the National Day of Civic Hacking! Although we’ll have some project ideas there, people will still be encouraged to bring their own. Regardless, it should be a great opportunity to build something and give back to the community. All skill levels are welcome, of course. :)

NOTE: The time frame for the June 2nd meetup isn't set in stone yet; we might meet earlier in the day than normal.