Hamburg Lab is the latest stop on civic tech across borders tour

Drew Wilson is a Code for America fellow who spent 2014 working with the city of Denver, Colorado to build web applications based on open data. In February & March he is traveling across Germany sharing stories & projects from his year at Code for America.

Hello Hamburg!

Every two weeks a dozen or two developers, designers, urbanists, journalists, hackers, and activists get together at the Hamburg offices of Open Data City. These volunteer civic techies make visualizations, create web maps, and build web apps that improve the way that Hamburg residents interact with and understand their city.

What kind of projects?

Right now members of Code for Hamburg are visualizing noise pollution, building an app to help parents find good kindergartens (Kitas), experimenting with public transit data, and they also made a funny tumblr of photos of things that are blocking bike lanes.

Civic tech across borders

There are now 18 Labs like this all over Germany and hundreds of community groups like this all over the world. Every Lab produces dozens of projects each year. Their members make apps, publish data-sets, organize events, and design new interfaces. But members rarely communicate with each other and many members of these simply don’t know what other people in other Labs are creating. If they did, they could possibly save time re-inventing the wheel and just redeploy each others’ projects. So for the next two months I’m traveling across Germany to cross-pollinate, share stories between these groups, and facilitate stronger connections.

Last night was the first in my series of presentations across Germany, where I shared 6 different civic tech projects from other “Code for” groups out there.

If you’re interested in checking out one of these presentations, I’ll be posting my upcoming travel dates soon. In the meantime, if you’d like to have me visit your city, get in touch: drew - at- codeforamerica.org.

Hope to see you in your city soon!