| Abstract | Civic hackers are a special breed—their primary motivation is closely tied to the social issues closest to their hearts. Most attend hack-a-thons, engage in civic meetups, and show up at city hearings to champion their cause and push solutions at the societal, technology, and policy levels. On the technological front, creating civic city-based solutions has traditionally been unnecessarily difficult. Data issues range from the lack of open data access to the inconsistent interpretation of current data sets to the difficulty of using federal data, such as U.S. census information. With this in mind, the U.S. Census Bureau created the U.S. City SDK: an open source, community-based, user-friendly software development kit for civic technologists, which takes the pain out of interacting with Census data, removes the need for them to become experts in Census methods and terminologies, and gets hacktivists to a deliverable quicker and with less hassle; all while enabling them to connect local |
