Photo courtesy of Danielle Ungermann.

Danielle Ungermann is the events coordinator of Code for Miami, which Knight Foundation supports to help attract and keep talent and expand opportunity in South Florida.

Every Monday night, you can be sure to find developers, designers, data geeks, leaders, and idea-makers massed together at The LAB Miami. It isn’t the latest startup to hit the South Florida scene; it’s Code for Miami, a volunteer Code for America brigade trying to improve civic technology for Miami-Dade residents.

With the support of Knight Foundation Fund, Code for Miami will host the I <Hacked> Miami CodeAcross Hackathon and Writeathon on Saturday, Feb. 21, to welcome more South Florida residents into civic hacking.

At the hackathon, writers, urbanists, civic hackers, government staff, developers, designers, community organizers and residents with the passion to make our region better will come together to hack, write and collaborate on four projects:

• Miami Answers: Create, organize and help answer some of the Miami community’s most commonly asked questions about their government and local neighborhood.
• Open 211: Creating an open-source platform that will serve as a directory for all of Miami-Dade County’s health, human and social services.
• Open 311: Use Miami-Dade’s new 311 API to create new visualizations or apps about civic services.
• Civic Tech Issues Finder: Solve unresolved civic tech Github issues for Miami and cities around the world.

Miami-Dade County will also unveil its new data portal, along with the new API for 311 information that will allow developers and designers to create new apps and visualizations for reporting and tracking civic issues. The portal is the first of its kind in Florida, and will serve as a growing repository for the county’s public data.

At the event, attendees will also discuss one of the brigade’s next big goals: helping Miami-Dade County to become one of a growing number of local governments to adopt a formal open data policy. Open data policies ensure that public data such as budgets, transit information and crime statistics are made freely available in easily accessible, standardized formats. Around the U.S., open data policies are driving transparency, community engagement, government accountability and innovation.

The hackathon will also include a presentation from Miami’s Code for America fellows, developer and designer Sophia Dengo, policy researcher Mathias Gibson and developer and Code for Miami co-founder Ernie Hsiung, who are working with Miami-Dade County throughout 2015 on improving technology related to economic development.

Through this daylong event, we hope to spark civic imaginations and to ignite skills into action. We hope that others will see just how easy it is to give back to Miami and make a difference using their talents. Thanks to the support of Knight Foundation, we’re excited to help new civic hackers get to work in our community.

I <Hacked> Miami CodeAcross 2015 will take place on Saturday, Feb. 21, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at Miami Ad School, 571 NW 28th St., Miami. To sign up, visit meetup.com/Code-for-Miami/events/219794137

Join in the conversation with #ihackedmiami, #opendataday and @codeformiami.

Code for Miami meets weekly at 7 p.m. on Mondays at the The LAB Miami.