--- title: 'Smart Columbus Hackathon: Building a Data-Driven City Together' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=appq0fQceP8' video_id: 'appq0fQceP8' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # Smart Columbus Hackathon: Building a Data-Driven City Together > Source: [Smart Columbus Hackathon: Building a Data-Driven City Together](https://youtube.com/watch?v=appq0fQceP8) ## Summary The video documents the Smart Columbus hackathon, where community members, technologists, and public/private sector volunteers collaborate to build applications using a smart city operating system. The goal is to leverage data to solve urban challenges like food access, elderly mobility, and traffic safety. ### Key Points - **Smart City Operating System** [00:00] — A web-based dynamic platform that aggregates and publishes data from multiple sources, critical for making cities smarter. - **Data as Central Component** [00:30] — Data is essential for smart city initiatives; without good data, smart city programs cannot be implemented effectively. - **Hackathon Format** [01:00] — A weekend-long event where technical and community people use the platform to give feedback and iterate quickly. - **Public-Private Collaboration** [01:30] — Smart Columbus brings together public and private sectors, with 125 members from 48 organizations volunteering to solve community problems. - **Community Co-Creation** [02:00] — The smart city initiative is co-created with the community, involving entrepreneurs, data experts, and citizens. - **Three Use Cases** [02:30] — The hackathon focused on food access, helping older adults get around, and understanding road safety issues. - **Data Synergies** [03:00] — Over 1,000 data sets were available, allowing cross-referencing and mapping that was not possible a year ago. - **Rapid Prototyping** [03:30] — Teams produced working applications in 54 hours, exceeding expectations and providing valuable insights for the operating system. - **Continued Engagement** [04:00] — Attendees are encouraged to join meetups, subject matter expert forums, and the Technical Working Group to sustain momentum. ### Conclusion The hackathon demonstrated that with the right data platform and collaborative environment, communities can rapidly develop solutions to urban challenges. The Smart Columbus operating system aims to become the heartbeat of the city, enabling real-time improvements and scalable impact. ## Transcript [Music] the smartphone this operating system is a web-based dynamic platform that is used to aggregate and publish data from multiple sources spanning both public and private sector the role of data is absolutely critical to helping cities become smarter it can be used to help hungry people find food sources as an example it's one of the use cases that were actually featuring in a hackathon so we won't have a smart city if we don't have good data and utilizing that data for kind of implementation of programs it's our data continues to be a central component for what's gonna make Columbus a wonderful smart thing the reason that you want to build a big data system is so you can gain insight so that you can improve people's lives you can imagine what it will do for health or it will do for food or will do for the elderly the vision of the smart city operating system is to inform the city on a day-in day-out real-time basis so that we can improve our signal light timing we can improve priority to emergency vehicles take the ideas of our entire community the best and brightest of Central Ohio and turn it into something that when we give it to other cities it has an impact on the entire world so close approaching our smart city efforts and complete collaboration it's so important because a lot of where the future is going is unknown and we need everybody's great ideas and great expertise and try and get to a successful place all together so since we just launched it it was really important to us that we got it in front of a large number of people so we can quickly get feedback and iterate and improve the tool I've been involved with startup weekends and other weekend long events where people come in and work on something for a weekend and we thought it would be really great to apply that format to this problem which is getting this in front of people getting really technical people but also people who can go out and talk to the community to use the platform and to give us feedback so we can iterate quickly and continue to lead this category one of the things that I really love about the smart Columbus program is how the public and private sector have come together to really make an impact on the community a lot of the people that have talked about the use cases today they're ambassadors from those groups this is a group of people that are volunteering their time we have a hundred and twenty-five members and representing over 48 different organizations they meet on a regular basis all very passionate about solving problems for our community a smart city is by definition a citywide initiative for this to really grow we need the community to pick up this flag and say we care about leveraging data and understanding what's going on with our city to make our city better and to help each other and the thing about the hackathon that's got me so excited in about smart Columbus is that for now we get to give life to this data let brilliant designers engineers architects take a look at it and see things in it that we in the nonprofit space might not see in our work we don't often get to have these kind of resources available to us especially for a food bank or especially food pantries that are located in church basements and community centers all across our community so we're very invested making sure we're engaging the right folks and really putting in place the pieces be helpful we want you to use this data and come up with creative ideas that's what's going to help us move forward we know we have been a data rich with information for and so this is really going to help make a difference for all neighborhoods for all communities known in city Columbus maybe across the state maybe across the country in world [Music] we want this to be co-created with our community and we want entrepreneurs data experts people that have technical expertise as well as great connections we all want to get to a better future we think we can get there better and more successfully when we do it together [Music] you're hanging out with the teams at the smart Columbus hackathon really impressed with the ideas that the teams are working on they're all really diverse they're this really collaborative brainstorming session that turned into dozens and dozens of potential use cases of problems we want to solve for the region we had a team of 40 plus volunteers from public sector the private sector universities we distilled it down to three use cases that we thought we could be most impactful with and that we thought the operating system would be a perfect way to dig into these cases and try to solve some of the more intractable problems we've seen in central Ohio [Music] and we have some really interesting data sets so the hope is that we'll come up with some ideas that we can build on you know we're just really looking forward to seeing what comes out of the hackathon and start to address issues around food access and around helping older adults get around and helping us understand safety issues on our roads [Music] already I've seen people pulling out the data set and seeing how they can slice and dice some of this data to have a true impact on the community and I think a lot of that wouldn't have been possible with how the smartphone operating system has been designed as the ability to map it very very quickly the ability to kind of cross-reference it but with over a thousand data sets there that was really powerful [Music] we're looking at this as something that could be the heartbeat of the city being able to get around in traffic helping getting meals to people and helping to optimize other aspects of our daily lives so I had two options either sit at home and and keep reading the documents that they have shared with me to be a facilitator actually in helping Smart City initiative or come to an hackathon and actually play around with data guess what which one I choose most of us don't know each other getting strangers together to work on something as a team just purely ad-hoc it's really really interesting and a lot of fun to see a lot of energy that has thankfully been allowed to kind of come together [Music] [Applause] this is my first hackathon so I'm super excited to like bring my talent through the team and in any way possible this is amazing I mean I've never done anything like this before there's a lot of talent here and there's a lot of people who are willing to work and willing to really solve something that needs to be done for the community using data that is widely available to us so it's really cool to be a part of something like that just by showing how many first-time attendees we have to an event like this and for this to be their first one I think really speaks to the power of the cause that they're interested in and the passion they have for improving our city the conversations that I'm hearing are really exciting just seeing this many people in this much energy in one room around these issues and just makes me optimistic about where we're headed with smart Columbus and with the operating system [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] feeling pretty good our presentations in a good spot right now we're just trying to merge everything together we have a couple of guys who did most of the visualization work they're gonna be running through demos of what they've done and how that aligns to the problem that we're trying to solve our dry run went really well people the audience were excited about it so that's pretty cool you always worry about a demo on the day it's something gonna go wrong but I think I've got the story right I've got my pitch so that it's about the right amount of time so I'm pretty good about that we were just kind of finishing our presentations as well biggest thing that we're trying to focus on is really getting a message across it's kind of down to the line after this it's go time so a little nervous a little tense but also like really excited [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] I am shocked really at the amount of progress that was made over the last 24 hours we had a couple of applications that I think can make immediate impact that's pretty darn cool when you consider 54 hours of work I think the work that was produced over the weekend exceeded our expectations it really gave us a ton of valuable insight into how do we produce an operating system that really can facilitate innovation and good solutions [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I think until you actually throw the operating system out in a while you have no idea how people are going to use it so this hackathon is really a first test of how will people music the feedback after this will be really important as we talk to the different teams as to what we can do better what functionalities people who had to make this operating system even more useful going forward we talked about bringing a lot of ghost spirit into the initiative I can really sense that today there's a lot of passion and I'm really excited about continuing this and tapping into this amazing talent that's here [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the group's the people it's outstanding we've made a family here when that family is going to continue to give value to Columbus and be able to make Columbus a great city using our technology [Applause] [Music] it was exciting I mean I didn't get a chance to come last year and so this was the first time I got to go to a hackathon I met a lot of cool people definitely some new friends right I would encourage everybody to do it and then you know got to really you know meet with some other people understand the data understand kind of what smart Columbus is doing this weekend was really short so we couldn't interact with everything I think after this weekend I'm kind of excited to see what all data we have in the smart city of us right now what data they're working to get in there and really interact with some of our data sets I think one of the big things that I learned though is that how quickly we can get to some of the solutions with the power of data sometimes you think that maybe a solution will take years and years to develop but I think this weekend proved we can get to action a lot quicker I actually learned that the a lot of collaboration is now possible in these data sets like a year ago the data sets were all siloed we knew they could be made together and we knew that technology could do this but it just wasn't in place and now that it is the synergies the data sets are starting to show every presentation had synergy and data sets a year ago most them didn't even connect to a single data set and we all guessed that there are synergies there and now we can actually see them it was really exciting I learned that there are folks that can come together with all of these different disciplines they can work together when they're given the right motivation the right tool set the right environment to be able to work in to be creative but more importantly the models that we build here will propel all of our communities across the country the idea that we can build this here and share it everywhere is very powerful [Music] [Applause] next up for the attendees I hope is that they continue to engage on the solution sets they can do continued community meetups to help push this ball forward and that's going to be a big big deal one of the things that full plate is excited about is the customer learning lab and so we're going to find out a little bit more about that we also learned about the meetups that are going to be happening our subject matter expert forum that we can park from mid-ohio Food Bank is going to be reaching out to us to see how we can kind of build on the momentum and keep it going individuals that are interested we're going to invite to be in our Technical Working Group and that technical working group is what advises the architecture of the system so they let me come even more deeply involved coming here today in hearing what all of these individuals are sharing and their innovations has been so inspiring I have a lot of hope for where all of these go [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]