An intense, 28-hour software programming “hackathon” in northern California last month produced 11 new smartphone apps that focused on public safety first responder features. The AT&T-sponsored event drew 70 participants in a half-contest, half-summer camp event that is common among programmers, but which focused on public safety for the very first time. The challenge was focused on three goals related to mobile communications: assist public safety officials with team communications, situational awareness and location tracking. AT&T invited several first responder representatives to provide programmers with an outline of their needs and to guide them during their work. Representatives from communications and security firms, and several government agencies were also present to provide additional expertise.
Typically, hackathons start with a completely unannounced goal, and require programmers to serve up a completely finished program by the deadline. In this case, the goals were pre-defined and in some cases the programmers could only manage to develop images of their final design.
The judges managed to pick three winners from among those submitted: First place went to InstantAct, which provides public safety officials in the field with a more modern way of communicating via voice as well as providing location awareness to colleagues. Second place went to Trakr, which enables both citizens and police officers to upload data regarding small crimes. The location of this information would then be analyzed with a heat map, enabling police departments to best utilize their resources. And third place went to CERTify, which allows community emergency response team (CERT) coordinators to manage the day-to-day activities of its CERT managers, helping to track their training and credentialing.
You can watch various videos of the hackathon here, and watch a video explanation of one of the entries here.
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