Last weekend was the yearly Canadian Open Data Experience hackathon and I spent some time to build an entry. For the longest time, I was considering not participating; mainly because the data sets are limiting and it’s difficult to think of any interesting or innovative ideas. But in the end, I ended up competing and I think I came up with a decent idea.

My app is called Concerns of my Community and its tagline is crowdsourcing government alerts that matter to you. The basic premise is that the government publishes lots of warnings and advisories that you should know about, but there’s no way you can keep up with all of them. By using social and geographic communities, these issues can be curated so ones that are relevant to you are brought to your attention. I had to pivot slightly from this idea, because it turns out that learning about issues would decrease your mental health rather than improve it (and the theme of the competition was healthy living). To fix this, I made sure that once you’re aware of an issue, the app gives you a combination of government and private sector information to act upon it.

I’m not sure whether I will publish it to Google Play and make it available to the public. Last year I was really gung-ho about this, but after seeing the outcome for a successful app like mine, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to polish and promote it yet.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, appdev, canada