Developers code their way to more efficient government at the GovDev Challenge

Posted by Scott McIntyre, Director, Google Enterprise Government Team

What can you do with 24 hours? Google teamed with the States of Colorado and Wyoming to ask more than 100 passionate developers at our inaugural GovDev Challenge, a live coding competition in Denver on May 17 and 18. After an all-nighter cranking out ideas, the coders came up with solutions to transform the way state governments work by using technology to bring innovative ideas to life.

Google collaborated with the State of Colorado and State of Wyoming to host the Challenge. We worked closely with the CIO Offices of both Colorado and Wyoming to identify tough problems that were meaningful to the states and able to be addressed during the 24-hour coding challenge. We’d like to give programmers from across the country the unique chance to make a real difference. To support the event, Wyoming CIO Flint Waters sent a school bus packed with programmers and spectators to Denver to attend. “It’s a great example of how to increase public engagement to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government,” said Brandon Williams from the Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology.

As they coded their way to better government services, participants got the chance to master tools like Google Cloud Platform, which enables developers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s reliable infrastructure. They also used other Google solutions such as Google Maps, Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance.

The specific challenges weren’t announced until game day, so participants showed up having no idea what kinds of applications they’d be developing. Colorado requested tools for managing records and tracking donations during natural disasters. “We’re looking to you to make the lives easier of citizens and volunteers who show up at disaster assistance centers,” Williams told the crowd.

Winners included the GovSafe team, who created a website that allows victims from disasters and volunteers to fill out a form online that could spare them the hassle of entering the same information multiple times for various paper documents. Recognizing that the government is not quite ready to go fully paperless, GovSafe incorporated hard copies into their system and used a printer to demonstrate the impact.

For the Wyoming challenge, competitors developed solutions allowing the public to see how taxpayer dollars are being spent. Although that data is publicly available, individuals can’t gather and visualize it without help from government workers. “This should really help us provide better information to our citizens so they know what’s going on,” explained Flint Waters, Wyoming’s CIO.

The CodeRangers team placed first for designing a mobile and desktop tool that displays the geographic distribution of public sector payments to private vendors. The public can easily see the location of vendors on a Google Map and can tell how much payment goes out of the state. They can drill down to the department level and see their spending patterns. They can also run queries by vendor names. “Governmental transparency is vitally important for citizen oversight of how our democratic process works,” said team member Anne Gunn. “The money comes from all of us, and we should know how it is being spent.”

Congratulations to everyone who took part in the GovDev Challenge, from the coders who traveled from far and wide to the officials who helped us with every step of the planning. We hope the event will serve as a blueprint for future partnerships between Google and the government, forged with the shared goal of solving tough problems with private sector talent. Together we help transform government, one innovation at a time.