EWING, NJ — The presentations and on-site judging of Sustainable Jersey’s first ever civic tech competition, Coding for Community, took place March 31 at The College of New Jersey. Competing teams working with 10 municipalities presented their civic tech solutions to an audience and judges for prizes. Encore Dev Labs, partnering with Maplewood, won first place.
AT&T provided $10,000 to Sustainable Jersey to use for prize money. The winning team received $8,000, free co-working space at a premiere location and coaching sessions with a venture capitalist and digital marketer. Each member of the winning team will have free entry into the 10-week Innovation Accelerator Program at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Runners up received $4,000. Municipalities supporting the winning team’s project received $2,000 for the first-place team and $1,000 for the second-place team. The finalist teams collaborated with the following New Jersey municipalities: East Orange, Haddonfield, Highland Park, Jersey City, Maplewood, Newark, New Brunswick, Perth Amboy, Princeton and Trenton.
The $8,000 Coding for Community challenge first-place winner is Encore Dev Labs for “Waste of Energy” that addresses a chronic overheating problem in South Orange-Maplewood School District buildings by collecting temperature data within classrooms and providing teachers a way to report overheating by creating trigger alerts that are sent to school administrators, enabling them to take action.
The $4,000 second-place winner is: Haddonfield and Team Dashability for the Data Visualization Dashboard, which allows green teams to share their progress in the Sustainable Jersey certification process through easy-to-understand visualizations and ways to push them out through social media.
The honorable mention for innovation went to Troop 58 for “My Town Hall.” This group created a skill for Amazon Alexa to answer common questions about the municipality that citizens could use. The honorable mention for presentation went to Hansen Unlimited for a street lamp detection program for Perth Amboy to help the city detect outages and improve public safety. And the honorable mention for data usability went to Bike View, which developed a way to map and create visualizations of current bike accident and crash data. It is currently being used by the Princeton Bicycle Committee and the Princeton Planning Department. The data is being used to inform the master plan process and Access Princeton, a group that will integrate the crash data into its 3-1-1 system.
The five judges for the Coding for Community competition were Aaron Price, the founder and CEO of Propelify; Adam Loehner, deputy village administrator for South Orange; Joel Natividad, the director of open data for OpenGov; Marc Pfeiffer of Pfeiffer Gov LLC; and Sara Appleton, a member of the Center for Urban Innovation at the New York City Economic Development Corporation.
“We are so proud of this two-month competition that connected towns in New Jersey with a talented pool of tech experts to solve local issues through the use of technology,” Lauren Skowronski, director for community engagement for Sustainable Jersey, said in a press release. “The collaboration has resulted in some outstanding solutions and the programming code for all the winning projects will be posted and available for anyone to adapt. We want all of our communities to benefit.”
Sustainable Jersey is partnering on this project with Jersey City, Code for Trenton, Code for Jersey City, Code for Princeton, OpenGov, the New Jersey Innovation Institute, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Sustainable Princeton, New Brunswick Office of Innovation and HackerNest. The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Knight Foundation are project funders.
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