Interview with a project leader

Project leader
Cathy Deng
Developer

How did you come up with the idea for this project?

We wanted to know how long il has gone without a budget, and turns out, seemingly simple high-level questions like this are very difficult to answer by browsing news articles.

How did Chi Hack Night help?

All the content was put together in one night at hack night!

What was the impact of your project?

To be honest, I’m not sure. I hope it set a precedent in widening people’s imaginations on what a civic tech project can look like. In any case, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had more traffic & greater reach than any given news article on the budget crisis.

What did you learn from this project?

Well-framed, small, non-technical tasks are awesome for volunteer projects (especially since so many hack night projects are big in scope/time commitment, & also mostly require technical skills). But, coming up with a good framing is the hard part. Also, static websites are perfectly cool projects.

Anything else to add?

I would love to see more projects that can engage non-technical people on the spot with little orientation. I’m very interested in the idea of ‘civic tech gateway drugs’ to pull in new folks. Having these types of projects would make for a much more vibrant & diverse group of people getting involved in breakout groups.

More on this project

The Illinois budget impasse in depressing count-up clock form, Craig Newman

ILBudgetClock on Twitter and Facebook.