When I was first getting started with programming and data science, one piece of advice I heard repeatedly was to attend a hackathon. Initially, I was pretty skeptical– I pictured staying up all night fueled on Red Bull vying to win a prize. This was unappealing because 1.) I’m not overly competitive, and 2.) I like to sleep. But when I found a hackathon weekend focused on “civic hacking,” or using publicly available data for civic good, I figured it was worth a shot.

And so I found myself one weekend in June at the 2015 SF Day of Civic Hacking at SF State. One of the projects pitched was around the health impacts of climate change, which appealed to me. My hope for the day was to pair with a more experienced Python developer and hopefully glean some knowledge from them. Well, instead I found myself in a group with a few other people who were interested in the topic, but none of us were particularly confident in our programming skills. I was the most familiar with R and Shiny apps, so I became the de facto software developer– definitely not what I had expected!

We hoped to build a visualization for policy makers that compared climate change to changes in community health, which would ideally increase concern about global warming. We had a lot of ideas about how we could so, or what our visualization might look like. However, when we got down to it, finding relevant data (and cleaning it) took a lot longer than any of us anticipated.

Our final product by the end of the weekend was a simple R Shiny app that showed changing average temperatures and number of West Nile Virus cases for each county in California.As a caveat, this visualization is primarily hypothesis-generating, as a simple correlation certainly shouldn’t imply a causal link. We initially hoped to include more measures of health than WNV incidence, but we easily found the data for WNV so included that in the prototype.  I also think the tool might be more useful if it were more granular (i.e. more local than county), which might help it ‘come alive’ to people that climate change is having an effect on their community.

 

To my astonishment– we placed 3rd in the competition. In a weekend full of surprises, this was certainly a happy one. I chalk it up in large part to having a working prototype. Sure it wasn’t perfect, and maybe other people’s ideas were more impressive, but we at least had a small tool that you could click on and interact with.

In the end, I found the weekend pretty fun and I did learn a lot about going from an idea to a working product. I also gained more confidence in building a quick and dirty Shiny app (code is here if you’re interested).