Experts 'Hack' Newark's Website—For a Good Cause

Ever visit the city of Newark’s website? Ever think to yourself it could be more informative and easier to use?

If you answered “yes,” then city officials are in perfect agreement with you.

Mayor Cory Booker last month hosted “HackNWK,” held at the headquarters of Audible.com, where teams of web design experts, open government advocates and others got together to come up with proposals to revamp Brick City’s main Web portal. The winning team will receive a $30,000 contract, with half the money contributed by Audible.com.

“They’re just a fantastic partner,” Seth Wainer, Booker’s technology advisor, said of Audible. “They got to see a lot of top-tier talent too.”

The city is allowed to award the  contract without resorting to the traditional bidding process because it’s providing less than the $17,500 threshold amount at which the state’s open bidding law kicks in.

A city spokesman, James Allen, said Wednesday a winning team has been identified but will not be made public until sometime in the next few weeks.  

“HackNWK” was just one of dozens of similar events taking place across the country June 1 and 2, which was the National Day of Civic Hacking.

Although the word “hacking” may bring to mind images of criminals breaking into computer networks to steal credit card numbers or cause mischief, the National Day of Civic Hacking had an entirely different purpose altogether: to use online technology to foster more open government.

The event was intended to “create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country,” according to a Web site promoting the event.

Wainer said that the overarching aim in Newark is to take the vast amounts of information gathered by city departments and convert it into “open data,” a format in which it can easily used and analyzed by outside groups.

One group that took part in HackNWK, Wainer said, was interested in making urban communities more walkable. Part of that process requires traffic data, which now exists, but not necessarily in a form that can easily be used by the group.

“It’s about making data machine-readable, not just putting PDFs on a Web site,” said Wainer.

Wainer also said that while the city government is the entity gathering the information, public employees are not necessarily the best-equipped to make that data as accessible and easy to use as it could possibly be -- hence the need for outside experts.

During HackNWK, those experts kicked around a range of ideas for improving Newark’s online presence, including a feature that would track residents’ real-time reports of  power outages and a calendar of events compatible with social media like Twitter.

Ultimately, Wainer said, the aim is to marry 21st century technology to a democratic ethos as old as the nation itself.