Hacking, it's a scary word these days. It's often associated with illegal activity like shutting down websites by force, stealing personal data, or stealing accounts from various online services. However hacking can, in fact, have a very different definition. Civic hacking is when "hackers" come together to create a solution to a problem by "thinking outside of the box". In just the same way as some hackers use their skills to figure out a way to use unconventional or never before thought of means to get around the "problem" of the barriers that prevent them from getting into a system, civic hackers use the same skills to figure a way around other problems in order to benefit society by creating open-source software that solves that problem or helps to solve that problem. A great example of this would be the app Ask Dory! that, to quote the opengovdata.io source below, "helps patients find information about clinical trials for cancer and other diseases, integrating data from ClinicalTrials.gov and making use of an entropy-based, decision-tree algorithm".
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| Plug-in Media | Creative JavaScript and HTML 5 Hack Day |
Personally my favourite thing about civic hacking is the hack days (AKA hackathons). Some organisations that have a problem to solve or want to help civic hackers to solve their own problems so they organise events called hack days. At these events civic hackers gather in groups in order to spend a large amount of time (usually a whole day or more) working pretty much flat out on a civic hack project. They are a great place to meet interesting and talented people, as well as get involved with something creative. It is often surprising how much can be done in such a relatively short amount of time by a small group of individuals; many of the projects created during these hackathons are quite impressive and often many will go on to become fully-fledged projects. If you are looking to get into the creative programming or independent app making community/industry then hack days are a great place to start.
Here at Goldsmiths University a few students, including myself, are trying to see if we can get a hack society set up for people who want to organise small-scale hackathons, meet up for civic hack projects, or just plain have a place to regularly meet in groups to get stuff done. If you have an interest in civic hacking or like the sound of a nice place to meet diverse groups from different departments to get some collaborative projects going then please check out the Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/311892885615125/?fref=ts. You need to be a Goldsmiths student with a Goldsmiths email in order to join as it will redirect you and ask you to register a Goldsmiths email with your Facebook account if you haven't already.
On the whole I really love the idea of civic hacking. It takes a term like hacking and completely turns it on its head. It takes skills that would normally be applied to breaking into systems and instead applies them to creating something new and solving real world problems.
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