Are We Represented, a team that developed an app focusing on local government, took the top prize in CityCamp NC’s showcase event last weekend.

The app is designed in part to answer the questions: “Are you represented? Do your officials represent your community?”

The team received a $1,000 prize.

The team talked about about correlating elected officials with the communities they represent in developing a tool that CityCamp says “will be used for journalists, research groups, and individual citizens, among others.”

Leonard Lawson, Eric Jackson, Janelle Bailey, Will Hartye, Laura Biediger, Lorien Olive and Jason Jones formed the team.

Summary: “Shed light on how representative our elected bodies are by comparing the demographics of local & state elected bodies with the demographics of the communities they represent. Goals are to visualize potential discrepancies in an easy-to-understand way, and to provide a tool for analysis of potential impact on other community outcomes.”

The competition

Other teams pitching in the showcase showdown were:

  • FindMeAGradSchool
  • Techies on Tour
  • ParkLocator
  • PriceGouging
  • SiteShield
  • DataBacon

A look at each of the other teams (information provided by Suzanne Beaumont):

  • DataBacon

“Our chatbot understands What, When, Why, Who, Where, Which, How based questions” team Data Bacon noted.

It’s a chatbot for restaurants that includes interactive recommendations amd tells customers much more about places to eat.

Team Members: Sriharish Ranganathan,Anand Niranjan

Summary: We are currently working on building a simple and Interactive question and answer chatbot to get restaurant information. Our chatbot understands What, When, Why, Who, Where, Which, How based questions and looks for the relevant response based on the question parameters and a set of rules that are defined for each question type and the system returns the most relevant answer to the question.

  • SiteShield

SiteShield is an Internet of Things app that incorporates weather radio warnings. The idea its developers says it to provide warnings regardless of political boundaries with an aim to improve tornado warnings.

Team members: Kristin Heibel, Jim Scarborough, Rob Montalvo

Summary: Improve on the idea of a weather radio by using internet to retrieve warning polygons, only alerting on actionable items for the singular installed location, and delivering site-specific sheltering instructions. This facilitates sheltering when needed, no unnecessary sheltering, and improves compliance through site-specific messaging.

  • Price Gouging

The Price Gouging app development stems from thousands of price gouging complaints made during a recent hurricane. The app is designed to enable easier submission of gouging complaints. ​

Team: William McGuire, Sophia Newton, Zeydy Ortiz, Mark Hutchinson

Summary: Aggregating social data to prevent or identify price gouging and shorten the time for prosecution when incidents occur

  • Park Locator

Park Locator is an app designed to locate parks regardless of local government jurisdiction.

Team: Brad Broge, Zack Clark

Summary: Have a unified park locator app that can find and display all parks, regardless of jurisdiction

  • Techies on Tour

Techies on Tour is intended to help promote inclusive events with community-driven technology.

Team: Lory Mills, Suzanne Beaumont, Stephen Larrick, Noel Isama, David Licause

Summary: A simple coordinated engagement model to bring volunteer technologists to nonprofits and community organizations, to listen to needs and offer support. Outcomes will include best practice guidance for brigades and other tech groups to engage with community orgs, an index/registry of local non-profits and their technical needs, an outreach list of tech volunteers, and a simple routing system to direct a recurring “flash mob” style event focusing all available volunteers on one community org per month.

  • FindMeAGradSchool

FindMeAGradSchool is an application that automates the process of finding graduate schools.

The team was led by Daniyar Zhumadilov.

Summary: Web-application (web-site) that suggests a list of graduate schools that future graduate students have higher chance of being admitted into based on students’ personal information (GPA, GRE, potentially, country they are from, financial capabilities).

​