Boston kicked off its first "hackathon" yesterday, turning to the local tech community to come up with ways to improve the city's outdated permitting system.
"Today is the first step in creating a user-friendly, fully online, permitting process," Mayor Martin J. Walsh told a room full of software developers yesterday at the start of the two-day "HubHacks" at District Hall in the Seaport District.
This weekend is the "centerpiece" of the city's plans to overhaul the permitting system, Walsh said.
Andrew Arace, an engineer at Geonetics in Boston, was working on a better method to search for addresses in the city's master database. He has been working with the city to improve the system, but said he came to the hackathon to build something that the city might not come up with on its own.
"We'd like to show what's possible," Arace said.
Arace and his teammates were working on one of four challenges this weekend. Other teams are trying to improve the process for obtaining permits for moving vans, and create a comprehensive system for finding the necessary permits for a specific job and a tracking system for permits.
William 'Buddy' Christopher Jr., the city's new head of the Inspectional Services Department, said the current permitting process is too complicated.
"Right now the process is very confusing; it's laden with contradictions; it's laden with inconsistencies," Christopher said.
Tech-savvy enough to wear a smartwatch and have several hackathons under his belt, Christopher said such events can produce great results.
"You get to experience people who look at things so differently and they ask all the right questions," Christopher said.
Yesterday, software developers and potential permit users worked side-by-side.
"I'm actually looking to open my own restaurant," said Adrian Wong, who said he has found most of the permits he will need are not available online.
Bill Oliver, a former IT director for a city in Connecticut, said he is spending his weekend working on Boston's permitting system because he has seen what happens with ineffective government systems.
"People want better government," he said. "They want it to work for them, not against them."
After this weekend, the city will put out a request for proposals to help improve the online permitting system, with the idea that many of the projects from this weekend will be formally submitted.
"Technology is never a solution by itself," said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city's new chief information officer. "But it's impossible to tackle the challenges, big or small, without great technology."
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