Creating The New NYC.org Site in Flatiron

The Flatiron District and NoMad are increasingly becoming new Tech havens, with many of the top Internet and technology companies locating to the area. This weekend there was a completely unique event going on at General Assembly, just a stones throw from the Kew Offices in NoMad. Tons web developers and designers from all over the country came to re-imagine NYC’s official website. The event was a hackathon titled “Reinvent NYC.gov, and was sponsored by the city in hopes of getting a fresh look to their old website.

Matthew Brimer is the co-founder of General Assembly, the “campus” for tech entrepreneurs which co-produced the two-day hackathon. He explained the event to the Village Voice saying, ”This is civic participation in the digital age.”

The participants of the event worked through the weekend — some working on their own and others with more organized development teams — putting concepts for a revised website for NYC.gov into full effect. There were a few reprieves from work: a dinner Saturday night was deemed Internet-free, and the participants were kicked out of the building at 1 a.m. Sunday morning. Teams returned just hours later to continue working through the day yesterday.

On Sunday, the creators lounged on couches and drank beers while watching demos of their peers’ products, as a row of judges — city officials and members of the New York tech scene — evaluated the sites and apps, with many of the demos trying to make information on NYC.gov easier to find, while implementing more elements of social media.

One idea that was featured in the Village Voice piece, was a widget that provides a highly accurate estimation of the time it will take to get from one point in the city to another, a service that many people traveling around NY would greatly appreciate.

The city is set to start on the official redesign of their site,but there is still no guarantee if any of the ideas produced over the course of this event will even be used. The timeline for the redesign will be finalized in the next couple of months, and we can see what improvements were made!