On May 13, a UF team came in second place and won $5,000 at the MuniMod hack-athon competition in Orlando.
MuniMod, a Florida League of Cities initiative, is the Southeast’s largest civic tech competition, and it presents teams with civic issues that are currently challenging society.
Ten teams, all representing different universities, work for four months to create a technology to modernize municipal government. The competition ends with a final 24-hour hack-athon, where a $10,000 prize is awarded to allow the winning team to continue to work on their project. This years winning team was from Florida State University.
The UF team, made up of Pablo Casilimas, a 22-year-old UF advertising senior; Jeff Streitmatter, a 22-year-old UF industrial engineering senior; Ben Anderson a 20-year-old UF public relations; and Hallie Zimmerman a 21-year-old UF sustainability and the built environment senior, created a mobile app called “IdenCity.”
The app allows local city officials to post plans and policies, giving citizens easy access to review and offer feedback through a simple voting feature on their phones.
“We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into at first,” Zimmerman said. “We were competing against the best of the best — some graduate and Ph.D. students — but we’ve had extensive training that has prepared us to think creatively, and we were able to pull off a win.”
In mid January, County Commissioner John Dailey contacted UF’s Innovation Academy with the hope of forming a team.
Zimmerman, who is the president of the Innovation Academy Ambassadors, was tasked with forming a group of students to represent UF.
“It was a nerve-wracking and exciting experience but it taught us that if we put our minds to completing something, strategizing about it, and working hard, success will come your way,” she said.
Jeff Citty, the director of Innovation Academy, is hopeful that UF’s success in MuniMod’s first year will continue in the future.
“We teach our students to seek out opportunities, apply the design process, provide a creative solution, work hard to meet the challenge and do an amazing job presenting,” Citty said. “That is exactly what our team did this year and it paid off.”
Casilimas said everyone at the competition shared a passion for creating something that encompassed a larger user interface.
“Florida is ranked last in terms of civic engagement and the most recent local election in Gainesville only had an 11-percent voter turnout,” Casilimas said. “It’s clear that civic engagement is something that needs to be changed in our state, so we pitched it to the mayor, to investors — we really wanted this to be a success.”
The competition may be over, but the work is far from finished. The team plans on taking the prize money and investing it into their app to start a pilot in Gainesville and eventually scale it out to other municipalities. In order to make it fully functional, Casilimas said about $30,000 will be needed.
“We really want to make this thing legit — a part of everyone’s daily life,” he said. “Just like scrolling through Facebook or checking your email.”
The UF team at MuniMod, a hack-athon that took place on May 13 in Orlando, won second place and was rewarded with $5,000 to put toward their app, “IdenCity.”
