Hacking for Good & Community Engagement - Lessons from Joplin, MO

1. Hacking for Good
& Community
Engagement
Joplin, MO
Underwritten By
GovLoop, 734 15th St. NW, Suite 500 Washington, D.C. 20005

2. /Joplin Hackathon
About Joplin Hackathon
Joplin is a city of 50,000 in the southwest corner of Missouri. from University of Missouri, Southwest Baptist University, and
On May 22, 2011, Joplin was struck by an extremely power- Manhattan, Kansas in the categories of design, community en-
ful EF-5 tornado, resulting in at least 161 deaths and more gagement, and emergency management.
than 900 injuries. Joplin also experienced extensive damage to
critical infrastructure that provides much needed services to One of the hackers for the event, Tabitha Jarvis who is a sopho-
citizens, total destruction of thousands of houses, and severe more at Southwest Baptist University, Bolivar, Missouri, stated,
damage to numerous apartments and businesses. St. John’s “When I think of government, I thought it was really high
Medical Center and multiple school buildings were damaged up. Now, I see through Joplin that government really wants
by the tornado. to communicate with its community, that they really want to
hear from the people who live here and find out what’s best for
Over the last year, the Joplin community has come together to the city.”
repair its city. Since the tornado struck, over 135,000 volun-
teers have been logged and nearly 15,000 volunteers have come Michael Ashford built on Tabitha’s sentiment, stating, “Our
to Joplin from across the globe to work on projects. During the expertise in local government website solutions provides the
tornado, the citizens of Joplin relied on the city website and backbone of our donation to the City of Joplin, but the Hack-
Facebook page for alerts. The IT staff had to handle content in athon is our way of engaging the region’s talent to contribute
seven different sites, and provide mobile access, as most citizens toward a best practice web site that can serve as a model of
did not have internet access. community engagement for communities around the country
and around the world.”
From April 27 through April 29, the City of Joplin and CivicP-
lus hosted the Joplin Hackathon to work on rebuilding Joplin’s
tech infrastructure. Using crisis management lessons learned
from the tornado and a year of rebuilding, the city had a list
of needs for a more modern web infrastructure. Michael Ash-
ford, Community Engagement Evangelist, CivicPlus, stated,
“The City of Joplin has dedicated their resources to managing
a complex cluster of seven websites to meeting the demands of
fourteen city departments, including the fire, police and public
works departments.”
During the Hackathon, nine teams competed over the week-
end to help create the digital townhall for City of Joplin. After
forty-eight hours of brainstorming, designing, and developing,
the projects were finished and presented to the judges. After
tough deliberation, the judges awarded prizes to participants
Based in Manhattan, Kansas, CivicPlus has designed over 1,100 local government websites that serve nearly 42 million citi-
zens throughout North America. Civic Plus was recently acknowledge as a recipient of the Center for Digital Government’s
Best Fit Integrator Award for delivering extraordinary digital solutions to public IT projects. CivicPlus transforms municipal
websites into powerful two-way communication platforms that lets citizens talk to and participate in local government. For
more information visit the CivicPlus website.

3. / Joplin Hackathon
Hackathon Lessons
There are many approaches to creating a city hackathon but
here are three key characteristics that I was really impressed
with during the Joplin Hackathon.
Engage with City Leaders
It is really important when working on any innovative project
to get buy-in from leadership who would use the new tools.
Before the event, CivicPlus spent time with the City of Joplin
and worked on developing city requirements that they pro-
vided for all the teams. They varied from use cases, specific
examples of other sites they liked, and process flows.
I was particularly impressed with the level of buy-in at the City Many of the developers on the teams either were personally
of Joplin. Both the city PIO and city IT leader were not only at there during the Joplin tornado or had family members that
the kick-off and closing events but literally stayed throughout were there. Thus, they developed use cases based on citizen
the weekend. They stopped by groups, attended meals, and needs, whether it was how they had trouble tracking down fam-
shared their interest. ily members or remembering that phone calls weren’t working
so they had to rely on text.
Additionally, a number of other city leaders played large roles.
The incoming mayor spoke at the kick-off while current mayor Additionally, teams actually walked the city and talked to po-
spoke at the closing award ceremony. City officials from fire, tential users. I was particularly impressed with the team from
police, and recreation departments stopped by throughout the Southern Baptist University. They spent two hours the first
weekend to provide content suggestions for their sections. night walking the streets of Joplin talking to a wide range of
citizens from youth to elderly, working to identify what there
Engage with Citizens main issues were with how the city uses technology.
When you are building tools to engage with citizens, it is amaz-
ing how often city officials and developers forget to actually Give Structured Freedom
talk to the citizens of the area. Too much structure limits creativity. No guidance and it be-
Three Lessons for Running a Hackathon comes hard to know where to start. I liked the structured free-
dom provided in the hackathon. There were three categories
• Engage With City Leaders of winners – design, community engagement, and emergency
management. The categories were broad enough that teams
• Engage With Citizens could come up with a range of solutions but focused enough
to give guidance.
• Give Structured Freedom
Teams were provided with pre-reading materials that allowed
some preparation of ideas but the real magic happened at the
event during crunch time.
“This Hackathon is truly amazing. So much is being done in
so little time – I’ve been maintaining 7 websites housing all
this content and now, we’ll be able to house it all within one
website with various departments being empowered to man-
age their respective areas of content – from an administrative
perspective as well as from a citizen feedback perspective,”
- Mark Morris, Director, Information Systems City of Joplin
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4. / Joplin Hackathon
Why Hackathons Matter
The impact of hackathons can be huge. Over the weekend, ernment websites, ranging from frequency of content updates
it was so impressive talking to the IT director at the City of to digital communication tools, online services, and advanced
Joplin. I especially found it interesting listening to his stories community engagement portals. When assessment is com-
of how he has worked really hard to make the city technology plete, information is aggregated and a stage of digital commu-
as great as it could be, but he is one person and it is impossible nity engagement is assigned with recommendations on how to
to do everything. reach the next step of engagement.
You could truly feel the impact of the hackathon when he The purpose of rankings like this for me is to provide a basic
made a moving speech where he choked up and discussed how gauge – it shows roughly who is doing digital engagement well
everyone had made an impact in the future of city of Joplin. and it provides a mechanism to celebrate those excelling. Also,
rankings produce an incentive for those at the bottom of the
It was powerful to see that building technology infrastructure scale to focus attention on digital engagement to craft a strat-
that helps the city is just as an important volunteer task as egy to move forward.
handing out food or rebuilding homes. A modern communi-
cation infrastructure isn’t just nice to have, but essential. As CivicPlus Vice President Jesse Manning noted: citizens ev-
erywhere are demanding better engagement with their local
“My favorite part of this event is having the opportunity governments but “Quantifying a community’s level of engage-
to serve. I didn’t have any other way to help Joplin so this ment on the web poses a challenge to government staff,” said
Hackathon was a nice way to help out. Through CivicPlus, Manning. Like any survey, there can be debates if the ques-
I learned that a lot of governments are using new technology tions are perfect or the scale is 100% foolproof, but the impor-
tant part is it starts a conversation within an agency, between
to reach out to its citizens, and after talking with citizens on
citizens and agency about community engagement.
Friday night, we heard they wanted a way of getting infor-
mation quickly – that inspired us to create our pop-up win-
dows with important messages that citizens could either close
or click on for more information.”
- Rachel Johnston, Junior at Southwest Baptist University
Future of Community Engagement
The future of community engagement is finding new ways to
provide citizens a way to engage with their citizens. For hun-
dreds of years, governments have solicited feedback from its
citizens – now the trick is learning how to engage during a
time when technology is rapidly evolving from Facebook to
text messaging to YouTube and more.
In times of shrinking budgets, community engagement can be
easy to cut. Community engagement is essential to any well- GovLoop’s mission is simple: connect government to improve
run democracy. By getting buy-in and feedback early on from government. We aim to inspire public sector professionals by
acting as the knowledge network for government.
citizens, we get better solutions and better run cities.
GovLoop serves more than 50,000 members by helping them to
That’s why I’m excited by the new Digital Community Engage- foster collaboration, learn from each other, solve problems and
ment Scorecard launched this week by CivicPlus, which helps advance in their government careers. The GovLoop community
municipalities and counties gauge the effectiveness of their cur- has been widely recognized across the public sector -- federal,
rent online communications and learn what steps they can take state local, industry and academia -- as a leading site for address-
to achieve higher levels of community engagement. ing public sector issues.
The Digital Community Engagement Scorecard starts the dia- GovLoop is the largest government niche network of its kind and
logue for measuring digital engagement by having a 1-6 score- boasts an extremely engaged membership that create or com-
ment on nearly 1,000 blog posts and discussion forums every
card of stages of digital community engagement based on a
month.
series of questions that explore various elements of their gov-
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