Ever get one of those pesky parking tickets for leaving your car along the side of the road during scheduled street sweeping? On Saturday, a group of San Diegans will be working on an app for that.
The app is part of the local version of the National Day of Civic Hacking. It's organized by open government advocacy group Open San Diego.
From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, members of the group will gather with San Diego city leaders, including City Councilman Todd Gloria and Chief Data Officer Maksim Percheskiy, at Fab Lab San Diego on 847 14th St.
They will work on the street sweeping app, which "would alert people about when the streets that they parked on are about to be visited by street sweepers," said Xavier Leonard, a spokesman for Open San Diego. They will also work on two other apps: a crowdsourcing app that tells users the best nearby parks and recreation spots, and an app that alerts users to new development in their neighborhoods.
But the event isn't exclusively for programmers, Leonard said.
"The goal on Saturday is to really engage people from all different sorts of backgrounds and age levels," he said. "There will be opportunities for developers and programmers to work with our members, but also will be engaging all the other attendees, whether they're designers or planners or just regular folk to give input on the apps and actually participate in designing things like the app interface and the navigation of the app."
There will also be coding lessons for kids and a digital mapping project where residents can add elements they think would improve their neighborhoods.
Other spots in the city will also be gathering places for work on different community projects.
In City Heights, work on a bike safety app will take place at the Placemaking Collective on 4089 Fairmount Ave. from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Participants will work on a program that shows the most frequently used bike routes in the city.
In Encanto, residents will gather at the San Diego Futures Foundation and Elementary Institute of Science on 608 51st St. from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The Jacobs Center and The Urban Collaborative Project will also host a Taste of Four Corners food market at the corner of Market Street and Imperial Avenue on Friday from 5 to 7 p.m. There, residents can record audio stories about how they'd like their community to change. Those stories will be streaming over the Internet on Saturday.
Leonard said the events are called "hacking" because the term “hack” means a fast solution to a problem. Each site will be working on "hacks" to improve their communities, he said.
