Calling all civic-minded geeks! Think your city could be better?

Be it Lahore or Karachi, we have civic problems! Do you want to bring a civic innovation revolution to Pakistan? Do you have ideas about how to fix things? Do you like working with other intelligent people? Have skills like web or mobile development or design? Want to innovate on top of government information and services? Apply your geek or creative skills to transforming your city for the better! 

We need to start innovating in public services if we want to see a change. Around the world, civic hackers are creating solutions that enable city governments to be more open, efficient, and in tune with the needs of citizens.

The Lahore Civic Hackathon will follow closely after Pakistan's first Civic Hackathon to bring together programmers, designers, urban mappers, data analysts, community organizers, and government information to reboot local services by creating open source web, mobile, and SMS applications. Imagine a peace corps of geeks for civic betterment.

During the 3-day Civic Hackathon, you will learn open-source hacking for civic good, get mentored, receive input from domain experts, and form teams to create useful prototypes that solve civic needs. All you need to do is bring your brain, skills, and enthusiasm!

Participation to the Hackathon is FREE, but admission is open only to those accepted from the pool of applicants. Please do NOT register here if you were not previously accepted.

All Lahore Civic Hackathon participants will have the opportunity to become Code for America Brigade members, to leverage an international network to continue civic hacking. We will share details of the Lahore Brigade at the event. 

SOME CHALLENGES:

Here are some problem statements that were submitted. You can start discussing these, as well as adding more problem statements in the Discussions section. You will have the opportunity to pitch these and other ideas in person, at the start of the hackathon.

• Challenge: Citizen Reporting Mechanism
  
  Citizens don't have an easy way to report problems with city facilities or get status updates regarding when something will be fixed
  
  

• Challenge: Information-Sharing Tool for Disaster Rescue and Relief Workers
  
  Rescue and Relief workers often encounter semantic interoperability issues while communicating with each other while carrying out relief operations
  
  

• Challenge: Analysis of Citizen Complaints
  
  As we create new civic engagement platforms for citizens to post complaints, there is no easy way to analyze these complaints
  
  

View all challenges

Rules

View full rules

Registration for this hackathon is only open to those who had previously applied and been officially accepted. Due to space constraints, we will have to remove anyone who registers here who is not on that admission list.

You can work on any idea that improves the public sector. Some broad categories to consider include Police and Public Safety, Traffic and Transit, Public Administration, Citizen Engagement, Public Health, Education, Agriculture, Energy and Utilities, Local Government, Disaster Management, Rescue Notification, Urban Development, Rural Development, and any other public domains.

The agenda for the weekend is at codeforpakistan.org/lhr-hacks.html.

• Problem-Solution Fit
  Is the problem well-defined? Is the solution a good fit for mitigating or resolving the issue?
• Potential Impact
  How widespread is the community problem that the application intends to solve? Is there any market research on the problem and solution? How will the application be maintained?
• Prototype
  How easy-to-use is the application? How elegant and engaging is the user experience and design? How functional and well-implemented is the prototype demo?
• Ease of Deployment
  Can the solution be scaled easily to actual deployment in the real world? How committed is the team to scaling and deploying the application beyond the hackathon? Has the team thought of a way to encourage adoption of the application by users?