OakGovChallenge First Place!
Cluebucket was fortunate to be recognized yesterday as the first place winner for the OakGovChallenge!
The OakGovChallenge was a contest sponsored by Oakland County, Michigan and AT&T to “encourage those who live, work or go to school in the Economic Growth Alliance (EGA) Region to develop innovative and creative web-based or mobile applications that enhance government services for citizens”
For my entry, I built an augmented reality app that allows users to visualize county provided data overlayed on top of a camera view. Here’s a screen cap to illustrate:
Using this app a realtor, tax assessor, home shopper, etc. can point her iPhone camera at an interesting piece of property and immediately retrieve relevant information about it. In this image above, the app is displaying parcel information, but by setting a couple user preferences, the user could just as easily be viewing information on dog licenses issued at this address, health and food safety violations, crime statistics or any other infomation available in an online data source.
Granted that this isn’t a new idea — augmented reality apps have been around for quite some time on the iPhone and pulling data from online data sources is no feat of magic either. But what I find interesting (and I think the judges did too) is the marriage between the capabilities of iOS devices and access to government data. Bringing citizens and businesses closer to the data that their government collects, creates, modifies and archives can result in a more transparent, productive relationships. Doing so in a means that is accessible, innovative and even fun (?) makes it compelling.
Right now, the app is a prototype but I’m looking forward to working with Oakland County on making the app fully functional and generally available!
