How can the City better work with Austin’s tech community to bring innovative approaches to civic challenges?

Bobby Levinski

City Council, District 8

I’m a huge fan of the hack-a-thons, because it shows how community collaboration and open data can help us innovate, in a relatively short amount of time. The open data portal was an important first step in making this kind of innovation possible, but the next step is the City actively engaging and presenting problems and opportunities to engage our talent. We have such an enormous resource being a tech hub, if we simply use it. I’d like to find ways to issue RFI-like challenges when we need to develop new databases or programs, so we are both creating opportunities locally while also expanding the box for innovation.