Announcement: We rocked CityCamp Raleigh! Great work everyone!

Congrats to you all for your great work at citycamp:

  • all teams pitch in final competition
  • three selected in top five
  • the Raleigh Retold team is runner up
  • the R Greenway team wins $5000!
Let's keep up this momentum and build cool stuff this semester. I know it will have real impact.
News from yesterday is below, more as it arrives.

CityCamp Raleigh Competes for Civic Innovation



The unconference at CityCamp Raleigh on June 2 was amazing. The ideas. The passion. The people. For those of you unfamiliar with the unconference format, we gathered at 9:00 am  on Saturday. The coffee was a little late, so we didn’t start until 9:15 am. We explained the process for the day…which went something like this:


Attendees were allowed to give 1-minute pitches for ideas, workshops, or projects. There were over 30 pitches Then attendees voted on their favorite ideas. We had five rooms with sessions starting every hour from 10am-4pm. One room was dedicated to TranspoCamp. (Okay, so we started a little late and the first two sessions were at 10:30 and 11:30, but we made up time during lunch.) The group gathered back at 12:55pm to go over the contest rules and address any questions. Then afternoon sessions started and teams started forming.

By the 4:00pm deadline, we had ten teams submit their project ideas. The concepts range from neighborhood story telling to open standards, a greenway application to developing a community health score, a mobile gaming idea for discovering more about Raleigh to searching various Raleigh resources in one place. And of course, QR codes. By the way, we have two teams with elected official on them. Maybe a first for any CityCamp worldwide.

Elected officials enhance CityCamp Raleigh 2012 experience


During Friday’s session, we had eight elected officials attend. Seven from Raleigh: Mayor Nancy McFarlane and City Council members Bonner Gaylord, Thomas Crowder, Randall Stagner, Mary Ann Baldwin, Russ Stephenson,  and Eugene Weeks; One from Cary, Town Council member Lori Bush who was on the government perspective panel and offered some great insights from just over the Raleigh border.

On Saturday, several elected officials returned and were very active during today’s sessions. Mayor Nancy McFarlane and City Council members Bonner Gaylord, Thomas Crowder, Mary Ann Baldwin, and Russ Stephenson. Stephenson even pitched an idea about community health scoring that attracted 20 people to a morning session. Attendees were