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CityCampMN 2013 Recap


CityCampMN 2013 is over, and it was a fantastic event full of meeting new people, discussing important issues, and building new technologies.

Some Numbers

Media Coverage

Pictures and Notes

A big thank you goes out to everybody who took notes during sessions and hackathon projects. Notes captured in a majority of the unconference discussions can be found at http://bit.ly/ccmnnotes2013, a great resource for anybody who wants to learn more about about the fantastic discussions that happened this wekend.

Another big thank you goes out to photographers, especially Tim Erickson and Cirien Saadeh.


Created with flickr slideshow.

Quick Takeaways

The biggest reason I call CityCampMN 2013 a fantastic success is the energy and vibe I saw that day. Through out the day I saw people talking EVERYWHERE. In sessions. In hallways. At lunch. During breakfast. At the reception. There was never a lull during the unconference; everybody had too much to talk about.

The diversity of participants and discussions also made CityCampMN 2013 a success. Technologists, community workers, educators, public employees, artists, and many more could be found at CityCampMN. Sessions covered digital inclusion; open data; fundraising; open source in governments; citizen engagement; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) resources; economic models; visualizing and telling stories with data; and many, many more.

Finally, CityCampMN 2013 involved an experiment: what happens when you follow an unconference with a hackathon? Closing the unconference with an ideation session for the hackathon brought out significant project ideas, including the need to tackle Minnesota’s opportunity gap; how to apply gamification to gather information and promote civic engagement; and how to use mapping to help parents find a place to live. For the hackathon itself, a lot of people came riding the wave of enthusiasm from the day before, and worked together on fantastic projects. Overall, I think closing the unconference with an ideation exercise for an associated hackathon worked great.