It’s been a couple of weeks since we wrapped up the first ever HRVA Civic Hackfest and I’m long overdue for a recap of events and outcomes. There’s a silver lining around the cloud of communication, though, because the work has continued and continues to get more awesome.

To review: we hacked over three days and nights on public data from City of Norfolk Cultural Affairs and Hampton Roads Transit. We used a “civic hack-a-thon” model organized by the new Code for America Brigade to do the work. Three challenges were put the the developers and designers who answered our call for civic heros. During the event these civic hackers sprinted toward simple apps they could deploy over the weekend. This was particularly a challenge for the HRT data since it was still in a mostly “raw dump.” More than an app, we needed an API.

iArtNorfolk shows the locations of Norfolk public art relative to your location

HRVA Civic Hackfest yielded a winning app in iArtNorfolk. iArtNorfolk is a mobile, geo-aware interface to Norfolk’s existing public art data. Other teams also created a Ruby interface to the HRT bus data and a time adherence layer over HRT’s General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). The Ruby interface makes it easier for Ruby developers to use the data. Adding time adherence to GTFS means that riders can see how well buses on routes are sticking to their normal schedules.

All participants were awarded 30-day passes from HRT. All participants who presented their results received GoPass365.

As great as all that was and is, some of the most exciting aspects have unfolded since the event.

Norfolk Cultural Affairs will award $1000 to the iArtNorfolk team to host and maintain the project. Other city leaders are also interested in the project and want to know how mobile apps for Norfolk can invite the 500,000 expected visitors to OpSail to explore the city.

Real time locations of buses on Route 20

And finally (for now), we published a mobile & web app that shows the real time locations of HRT buses! The app shows the locations of by route on a Google map, together with each bus’s direction and time adherence (on time or minutes late).

If you want to know who all of these amazing people are to make this all happen, check out the guest list for the event, the email forum, and the git hub. There you’ll find citizen developers, city officials, data reporters, and all sorts of civic minded hackers who are working together to understand and improve the interfaces to Hampton Roads using the web and government as platforms for innovation.

If you want to participate, go to HRVA Brigade at brigade.codeforamerica.org, create a profile, and join the email forum. (Everything is public in case you want to follow along without participating.)