Sustainable Jersey’s Coding for Community Competition Winners Announced

The presentations and on-site judging of Sustainable Jersey’s first ever civic tech competition, Coding for Community, took place today at The College of New Jersey. Competing teams working with ten municipalities presented their civic tech solutions to an audience and judges for prizes.

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 ten-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 Sustainable Jersey Coding for Community winners are:

The $8,000 Coding for Community Challenge First Place Winner:

• Encore Dev Labs: For Waste of Energy that addresses a chronic overheating problem in the South Orange and Maplewood School District school system 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 Township of Maplewood will receive $2,000 for partnering and supporting the winning team.

 

The $4,000 Coding for Community Challenge Second Place Winner is:

• 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.

• Haddonfield Borough will receive $1,000 for partnering and supporting the winning team.

 

The Honorable Mentions Include:

• Honorable Mention for Innovation - 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.

• Honorable Mention for Presentation - Hansen Unlimited for a Street Lamp Detection program for the City of Perth Amboy to help the city detect outages and improve public safety.

• Honorable Mention for Data Usability - Bike View 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 their 311 system.

The five judges for the Coding for Community Competition are: Aaron Price, the Founder and CEO of Propelify, Adam Loehner, the Deputy Village Administrator for South Orange, Joel Natividad, the Director of Open Data for OpenGov, Marc Pfeiffer of PfeifferGov LLC and Sara Appleton a Member of theCenter for Urban Innovation at the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

Lauren Skowronski, director for community engagement for Sustainable Jersey said, “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. 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 the City of 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.