Coders, Developers, And Data Scientists, Oh My!

Chicago’s civic tech community knows that if it’s Tuesday night at the Merchandise Mart, it’s Chi Hack Night. Team Current debuted our H2NOW Chicago project to the Chi Hack Night community on January 28th, 2020, kicking off a new collaboration with the coders, developers and data scientists, who we hope will kick the tires on our real-time water quality monitoring project as we prepare for the public launch this spring.

Like the Chi Hack Night community, Current values constructive critique and collaborative development, and our team gained a lot of valuable insight from this opportunity to workshop H2NOW with a broad and diverse audience of talented techies. After presenting, we went deep on product, user experience, and community engagement with more than fifteen passionate community members in our first breakout group. (For those of you unfamiliar with Chi Hack Night, the standard program includes feature presentations and topic-specific prototyping and learning groups led by regular facilitators to guide conversations, answer questions, and build teams for civic apps. The groups are split into two types: prototyping groups and learning groups.)

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be establishing an ongoing breakout group to engage anyone at Chi Hack Night who would like to work with our key tech partners to contribute to the development of the H2NOW online platform. Please reach out to George Brigandi, if you are one of them!