Wyolution partners Mark Thoney and Jared Kail joined Anne Gunn of the Sheridan Programmers Guild and Tighe Fagen of Gannett Peak Technical Services to form a 4-person team named “Code Rangers” to compete in Google’s first ever GovDev Challenge. The 24-hour hack-a-thon, held on May 17th and 18th, 2014, in Denver, Colorado, was a partnership between the states of Wyoming and Colorado, Google and MoDev. The goal of the event was to find creative technical solutions to problems faced by state government.
The three challenges of the competition were not known to participants prior to the event. Of the three issues presented, Code Rangers chose the only challenge put forth by the State of Wyoming: Government Budget Transparency. “Wyoming is more than a place where we live – it’s our passion,” remarked Jared Kail. “That’s why when Wyoming presented a problem it was facing, we knew we had to tackle it.”
At the end of the caffeine-fueled coding event, Code Rangers ended up taking 1st place honors in its challenge category. “It took us by surprise, really. We drove down to Denver to work together as a team, meet new programmers, learn a few new things, and maybe to help solve some problems at the state. We didn’t think that winning was in the cards for us,” commented Mark Thoney, of Wyolution.
Code Ranger’s final 24-hour project can be found at http://govdev.wyolution.com. The project was conceptualized to take the complex and large set of state vendor data, combine it with publicly available information, and present it in a way that is intuitive and easy to use. “Our goal was to create a solution that was easy to use and would pique visitors’ curiosity. If we did our jobs right, the data will generate more questions than it answers – questions that taxpayers should be asking of their state government,” Kail said.
The team encourages you to go out to the site, try it out, and leave feedback via the form at the bottom of the page.
Google’s writeup about the event can be found on the Google | Official Enterprise Blog, “Developers code their way to more efficient government at the GovDev Challenge“
Video From Google
Video from K2 of Wyoming:
Video from 9News of Colorado:
