Business as Usual: Top Three Finishers of the Pittsburgh Civic Hackathon

 

So good afternoon, everyone. Happy Friday. This is Andre Russo, President and CEO, the Pittsburgh Technology Council. And it's a great way to wrap up the week. I'm very excited about talking with the winners from the Pittsburgh civic hackathon. We're going to talk about that in a minute in more detail. But I today I have Ryan gent on our team, he is going to be joining us talking about the hackathon. And then we're going to pull in Kitt Mueller, who is the founder of rust belt and helped us with the hackathon as well. So before we get started a couple of things to just clear the table. For number one, we've muted your your microphone so that we don't hear anything in the background. And we've allowed an opportunity for a chat. So if you want to ask any questions, feel free to do that both Ryan and I will keep our eyes on the chat to make sure that we're addressing them. But since the Civic hackathon occurred, I want to give a deep appreciation for those who not only sponsor, the business's usual series, which is Huntington bank, as well as 40 by 80, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Pittsburgh tech Council, but we also had sponsors for the hackathon, I want to express deep appreciation for them. That's bank in New York Mellon, CGI, and participating sponsor IQ, Inc. Thank them. So I'm thanking them so much for the work that they've done to just continue to be advocates and supporters of all the work that's happening in this region. So we want to just let everyone know, what's the Civic hackathon just really briefly, and Ryan's definitely going to jump in. I'm thrilled to have him on the show with us today. But you know, back in May, it seems like a long time ago, back in May, you know, we're pretty passionate at the tech Council, about building community, and building communities done in so many different ways. Having a hackathon and doing startup weekends, and you know, kit kit, and I go way back in terms of experimenting and startup weekends, and just getting people together, it's really part of building the social fabric of the region, and making sure that there's opportunities for people to participate in cultivating ideas and taking some of their problems that they'd like to solve, but just don't know what to do with it, or how to even begin to attack bringing people together. And that's really what this is about. It's about having a lot of smart people, which is really incredible. And Ryan will talk about that a lot of smart people who get together on their own time on Friday night, spend probably 50 plus hours trying to build their ideas. And their ideas may result in something left side, you know, commercialized, which is amazing. And when we thought about civic hackathon, particularly during COVID, which we still are in we are we thought about what are the big problems that we need to solve what's coming around the bend? What kinds of things are giving people anks that they know that they can solve problems about? And that's really, that was really the crux of trying to do this work, is that you know, during COVID week, the first time around, I remember Ryan and he'll be on in a second. We were like, Can we do this virtually? How will we be able to pull this off virtually. And I've got to tell you, both of these hackathons, hackathons that are doing it virtually, it's just amazing. The amount of connectivity in the amount of relationships that people were able to build was, I would say, just as powerful as when we were in person, I'm not saying being in person doesn't have a huge amount of perks, and a huge amount of benefit. But we have built new friends, people have built new relationships, and people have seen the power of having an idea and coming together no matter what their skill set might be. Obviously, we needed a lot of technology skill sets. But that's not the only thing you need. When you have a hackathon, you need people who know how to sell people who know how to think user design, people who know how to enquire, you know, with potential customers, people know how to problem solve, and all of us possess a lot of those skills. And that's sort of the magic in this. And you know, there were three winners, essentially three finalists, I came out of all these ideas. And what I want to do is I want Ryan to just sort of set the stage and Kitt to jump in and just talk a little bit about the mentors. And then we're gonna jump in and get a chance to talk to each of these ideas and where they're at, and how they responded to the weekend. And you know, what's next for them. So, without any further comments, I want to jump to Ryan Ryan. Ryan is on the tech council team. And he does a lot in the community. He's, he's, he's our business development person, but he does a lot in terms of pulling the community together to make sure that they know the kind of work that we do at the tech Council. So Ryan, to the forefront. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you. You did a good job of kind of covering what it was and You know, we were somewhat fortunate to have such a captive audience late January in Pittsburgh during a pandemic, everyone's at home. So it's really, you know, helpful and so even though you're right it is is a little bit different in person and we will be doing an in person one as soon as we can, you know, those connections over zoom were pretty concrete, you know, especially coming in over the weekend with the mentors, and I didn't feel like we were losing all that much.

I think, you know, kit if kit Mueller I want to bring kit to the forefront really quickly. Kids he's in his car. He thinks he's he's pretending that he's going somewhere, but we know he's just, you know, working out of his car on a Friday

night you guys jump in. Have you ever spent a whole weekend with kid

it's a lot

of hard work, but

awkward. Talk about the mentor piece and talk a little bit about the hackathon.

Well, Adria couldn't be more, right. I mean, the the we've, we've we've done these in the past, but especially during now in the in the kind of, you know, the new reality that we're in, it's it, we need good news. And it's especially rewarding to be a part of that good news. So the novel ideas that were brought, you know, on Friday night, and then the teams that were formed around those from the attending participants. And then Saturday, when you kind of you're freaking out, like going get social validation. And we start, you know, mapping out the plan. And then you have members of the community that raised their hand, and said, I want to help bring either my expertise, my connections, context, and networks, to bear to catalyze these ideas. So we had people from the broad cross section of the innovation ecosystem here, lending their technical talents, their business talents, and frankly, their their networks to help these ideas have legs beyond the weekend. And Ryan and I found out shortly after the event, that the top three teams were the ones that scheduled the most mentor office hours. So it shows kind of the benefit of the community leaning in and helping these teams.

Wow, that's interesting. So we had mentors that were from, like, across the technology ecosystem.

I mean, we had, you know, I mean, you know, leaders in our technical industry, like Andy Fraley, people in the business community like Stephen Miller, you know, we had people that have scaled companies like Elizabeth gross, we had amazing tech talent from the NY Mellon, and IQ Inc. and word, right. I mean, they were they stood ready all day, john Dean, I mean, I mean, we had him as kind of an interim CTO for a team. So we they stood in with the teams, most of them all day, Saturday, and then on Saturday, help them refine their their narrative, which is awesome.

And then by Sunday night, the team's all presented. And now we're going to jump in with the three winners, essentially, these are the three of how many teams? Were there, Ryan?

We had, what do we have, we had nine kids that made it through the weekend,

that pitch 10.

Okay, we had a couple that that merged and then came out, I think Friday night with 17, one minute pitches, and then we voted those down to see who would move forward. And then people who didn't get, you know, their teams didn't go forward. They ended up joining other teams.

Burns just wrote and said, the mentors were amazing. So thank you for that. So So Ryan, let's, let's who we bring it up first, Matt,

let's go to Matt and Matt, I know you're gonna have them help you out, but free to ask them, you know, what was the Civic problem that you saw in the community? Thought you did address? What was your experience, like over the weekend? And what have you accomplished on the project since the hackathon ended?

Sure. And so we're more than happy to talk about that. And I'll pass over to that in a moment. But the the problem that we were really having, or that we saw in the community was something that was very close to everybody on the team who's suffered significant loss from COVID 19. And the problem that we basically saw is basically trying to sign their loved ones up to get vaccinated for COVID-19. And the process just being the status quo that it is. And basically, you know, we wanted to solve that problem. As then, just the logistics of it right now, the way it is, is that you go to the state site, it points you to another site, and then you try to get into that site. And there's a whole myriad of problems that happen, but basically what it's, it's making people have to spend hours upon hours upon hours upon hours a day, just trying to get signed up just to get vaccinated, or to get to the site and find out, they got to come back again. But so we made a single sign on registry site for that. For anybody that would be willing to participate in it, you know, in Allegheny County, or actually could be on Allegheny County because we use the data from from the state so That's the problem we solved. And I'll talk a little bit about some of the progress real quick. And then I'll talk, let Ben take over here for just a second. So we're already you know, basically found an incubator. Some people have already given us funding, the nonprofit is, you know, in the works of being developed right now, I got to thank actually my friend Jean from Jetstar for helping us with that. I got help Andrew, a senior leader in Pittsburgh, also for that. And you know, all the mentors. And they came in and helped us especially I want to talk about Jason cables, he mentioned soft riders was invaluable to the amount of information they had to help us with. So I want to mention that as well. So, and also the Pittsburgh rotary for helping us with a lot of the nonprofit stuff. They've been a big, big help as well. So I'll let Ben talk more about the solution real quick as well,

thank you.

So we have a website where people can go and fill in the form, the part for individuals is pretty much ready for an MVP type of demo, there's one piece of getting markers on a map that would be remaining. And then the other side for allowing the distribution sites to log in create appointments, and things like that is in the works. Now. We've been very, thankfully, generously supported with some initial upfront development skills through sigma resources, which is my employer, it's a tech consulting firm in the south side of Pittsburgh, and are recruiting volunteers. And if folks want to make matching donations, or contribute time and tech skills, especially with react or Java, back end pieces, we certainly have some additional tasks to help get that to an MVP stage as quickly as possible. And then if it's demonstrating some uptake with vaccine site providers, then we would be looking to incorporate the nonprofit and sort of spin this up.

So one of the things I just want everyone to realize I'm just blown away. First of all, Ryan, one of the criteria was that you have to come to the hackathon with an idea that has not been baked, right? Like it can't be baked. So here, how many days is the span?

So this was a hackathon. It's been less than two weeks, since this was just a verbal pitch an idea and a complaint about how terrible the State's website was.

Which is just incredible. So what would what other takeaways Did you have from the weekend, like 14 days, 14 days? This is what's happened? What are your takeaways?

The mentors did provide some good pointers and use resources. I thought it was really great to have not just technical people on the team, but also non technical people. I see Kate here, who's really added a lot from her perspective. And we had Ty from Dick's Sporting Goods who did a lot on backend stuff. So even though he couldn't continue, those contributions are still valuable. Yeah.

Well, are you amazed that within less than 14 days, this is where you are?

Yeah, I'm actually a little bit surprised that it hasn't maintained the same pace as that weekend. But that was like a really breakneck pace. So hey, it's not totally surprising. And we've gotten more into the subtle details of like, Okay, if you're not looking for both doses, and you have to enter the date of the first one, and it'll compute whether, you know, what the date of the second one should be based on the brand and the type. So those kinds of edge cases are becoming more of the progress fronts now on that side?

And did you all know each other when you form this group?

None of us knew

each other at all. For strangers,

strangers, not anymore strangers. So don't go away. Ryan's gonna bring up the next group.

Yeah, let's bring up Logan from AD writer to talk about your project. And Logan, if you want to mention to you have a surprise guest pop it in the middle of your presentation. So I'd like you to cover that at some point.

Absolutely. And by the way, over the course of the weekend, I learned that the word absolutely is my new favorite word. So probably from Friday through Sunday, we were working on a concept to reduce bus fares in Pittsburgh, the Civic problem that we identified was access to transportation. We've estimated that it takes about 46 minutes each day for a minimum wage worker to pay essentially pay off their bus fare in terms of the amount of hours that they work. And that's if they go to and from work on a bus. So we were working on a project Subject to lower that bus fare by increasing ad revenue for the Port Authority. And as Ryan mentioned, we were so graciously joined during the final presentations by Catherine kelemen, the CEO of the Port Authority. And we were we had an inkling that she may come and watch our presentation, but we had no idea that we would actually have a chance to hear from her. It was amazing to get that validation from her. You know, it put a huge smile on the team space, collectively. And it was just the weekend itself was a whirlwind pace, these kind of events, always our I got a chance to meet some new mentors. And some old mentors that I've actually worked with on startup weekends and things like that in the past, like Patrick Perrine was there. And I hadn't spoken to in probably four years, but it was excellent to reconnect with him. And we picked right up where we left off. But I'm sorry, I think I forgot a part of the

prompt will tell us how you solve this, you're trying to solve this problem, right? So finish the pitch on what you think the winners for the problem and why Katherine is interested in this.

Absolutely. So the idea that we put forth to increase that ad revenue is to put advertising displays digital advertising displays on the sides of Port Authority buses. So we would put those displays on and we're actually working on building out a set a simple self serve ad platform, similar to how you can go right on Facebook and create an ad and have it start displaying almost immediately. We're working on that. But for physical space advertising, essentially think of the Port Authority's 720 bus fleet, as a 720 struck billboards that can move throughout the city, you can't put up a billboard in the middle of downtown, but you can put a bus have put an ad on a bus that goes right through downtown, and is seen by 1000s of people each day. So we've actually had a chance to in terms of progress, we've actually had a chance to meet with Katherine, again, from the Port Authority. I had a meeting with her on Tuesday of this week. She's extremely excited, we're setting up another meeting for the beginning of March to work on the next steps. We actually have discovered that the Port Authority is working on and taking delivery on 60 buses that have internal digital displays. So they actually have the buses ready to go that have advertising displays, they just need a way to get ads to those displays. And that is a great place for us to step in and say hey, we can help with that.

And this will provide a lot more revenue than then Katherine has actually ever anticipated, right?

Yes. So currently, based on the reports that the Port Authority puts out each year, they make a little bit less than $3 million per year on ad revenue across, you know, their buses, the T bus stations everywhere. We estimate that by putting one ad on the side of each bus, we can increase revenue to $110 million per year for the Port Authority.

And Catherine, Catherine was wowed by that she thought that was possible based on your findings?

Yes. And the great thing is that's one ad on the side of each bus that doesn't even get into the depths of internal advertising. Or, you know, if we put an ad on both sides of the bus. So there's actually even greater potential there, then just that that initial finger.

Wow. So how many people on your team? And did you all come in with this being the problem? Whose idea was this?

Yeah, so actually, the I gave the initial pitch on Friday night, I came up with the idea. I was talking with my wife, who's a social worker. And one of the things that always comes up is access to transportation for the people she works with. And it was just something that I had never thought about. So that happens a lot with her and I asked about a problem. She tells me about a problem. And then I tried to come up with a solution. So on Friday night, I pitched the problem. I was joined by eight other great team members, two of whom I knew from my time at Grove City. But six total strangers joined our team as well. Actually, I just got a message from Aaron on our team who said, Hey, good luck today. Great job. So that's cool. We're actually all still in touch. But I gave the initial pitch. We were joined. If it's okay, I'll give a shout out to my team real quick. We had like that slightly larger team, but I had Aaron and Keita, Cameron, Bobby, Eva, Jordan, Megan and Maria. And we actually we faced some interesting challenges. Jordan's internet went down not halfway through Saturday and he couldn't get it to come back on. We had all kinds of things going on. And actually one of our team members was even in Florida. She heard about the competition through LinkedIn and joined us from from Florida.

And so how are you keeping connected right now?

Yeah, so we actually, one of the first things we did on the weekend was we set up a Slack channel for our own team. So we've kind of dropped, you know, different press releases and things that we've been featured in, in that Slack channel. And then we're all communicating about the messages or the meetings that I'm having things like that I'm kind of taking the lead right now on having those meetings so that we don't overwhelm anyone with having nine people in a meeting. But there are a few team members who are looking forward to being a part of this in the future as well.

So how often are you getting together and communicating on slack?

So I would say probably every other day or so we're having conversations about, you know, hey, we were just featured in, there was an article in next Pittsburgh, for example, we were Grove City College, did a press release, or the Pittsburgh Business Times, put out an article. So we're always talking about those things. Looking at the next steps. I'm communicating what's happening in the meetings, for example, the meeting with Catherine, I was able to give an update on what all happened there. And we are just kind of, you know, it's one of those things where it's kind of asynchronous at the moment. But it is the communication is happening there as well.

Well, that's great. So Brian Kennedy puts out there I totally forgot. But Catherine Kelvin is going to be live on business. As usual. On March 1, she's going to be giving us an update on all things that they're working on there. And Patrick Perrine is an old friend of the tech Council and of mine, actually, he Jonathan put out there that he was the founder back. I don't know how many years ago of mega mega, really cool of him being in the valley and participating. So however, however, Ryan and Kitt Lord a man, that's pretty, that's really awesome. And then Ben is also saying, Hey, we still we have a they have a private chat, Slack channel that they're doing as well, so that those tools are really working. Is there anything else Logan that you want to share about the weekend? Well, of course, I

would. I don't have something to share. But I would just like to say thank you to everyone who helped make the weekend possible kit Ryan, for your organization, and everyone else, counsel. You know, I have done several. I think I've said this before, but I've done several startup weekends. This was my first hackathon and my first virtual foray into a weekend long competition. And I got to say that, you know, it was extremely organized for having people all over the city all over the country, even joining and, you know, participating in that way. So, thank you very much. Thank you, Audrey, for your guidance during the weekend as well.

No, it was great. It was great fun. What a privilege. So don't go away. Ryan's gonna bring up our third winner.

Yep, we have peer support. And Kara is going to tell us all about that project.

Thanks, Ryan, Audrey. Yeah, so peer support, we were targeting first responders, the peer support. Calling it buddy system is providing peer to peer support for people suffering emotional, mental health struggles or issues. And the reason that we kind of targeted This was I was actually talking to a lot of friends, friends of friends working in the frontline health care, industry, as well as a lot of first responders. And I noticed a lot of people were really struggling with anxiety, stress, especially with everything going on with COVID. And a lot of the political atmosphere going on. And one thing that I kept hearing was nobody wanted to go to therapy, but they would try to reach out to their co workers or people similar, experiencing similar things to try to get help. But there was a lack of structure kind of supporting that. So they weren't always able to get the help that they needed. So we came up with a buddy system allowing anonymous connections between first responders, frontline, frontline health care workers. That was what we worked on over the weekend. But going forward, we're hoping to allow them to be able to track what's going on, maybe predict when they're going to feel or need that help and then provide one on one meetings with peers, based on their similar background experiences and traumas and trying to optimize those matches for them.

So where are you now? Where's Where are you now in the journey? I mean, we're only today would have been 14 days. So tonight, where we're How far have you gotten and what's next?

Sure. So actually, yesterday I just found out I'm a grad student at CMU and I applied for our NSF I Corps site program, to get a grant to do customer discovery and just found out yesterday we got that mini grant. So Going to work on customer discovery, a lot more. Really focusing on the first responders, but also want to look at a couple other markets to see where else solution like this can be applied.

Wow, that's really great news. That's really into how many people were on the team. And are they on the call?

Yeah. So Stacy and Jean, are on the call. And they're both on the team. And we work really closely together and work really well over the weekend. And we actually set up weekly meetings going forward, to continue working on this.

Wow, I mean, that that's just incredible. We could not have crafted this any different Ryan and Kitt. We couldn't have asked for more To tell you the truth. So what can we do? What can all of us here do to be helpful right now? So this is ideas, Ryan has reminded me that these are ideas are not yet companies, but it sounds like they soon will be. What can we do as a tech community and all of us listening to you right now? There have been some links that are put on chat, I see that if anyone wants to reach out, but what can we do to be helpful? I mean, just I mean, care, when you think of what you're, you know, the problem that you're trying to solve, it's a problem that I had never thought of, until I listened to the pitch. And when it really resonated with me, and I thought there aren't enough mental health professionals, even if the even if those relationships did work, for people to gain access to that kind of support.

Yeah, and that that's one thing that we found in talking to people over the weekend, and since then, that even even if they were effective, it's really hard to it's not accessible, or as accessible as they'd like it to be. So I think that what we need, I mean, anything helps, but if you know, anybody that works in frontline health care, or first responders that we could talk to any mental health professionals or people who've worked on peer support systems would be really helpful. That That would be great. And just just a side note, my teammates would joke if anybody has any art for my wall. That was a running joke over the weekend. This my walls were pretty boring. You can see,

okay, we can we can help. There's no middle class was too small. That's fine. Um, and then with this, are you getting money then from Carnegie Mellon, in terms of this, so this will help you get to the next stage?

Yeah, so we are getting it. It's very small amount, but it will help us with our customer discovery efforts. Definitely.

Okay. Wow.

I don't think all three teams moved forward this this much the last time kit.

Do you know now not just fast for? For sure. Yes, I'm

gonna keep in touch with everyone. And I'm gonna keep everybody informed on the progress because it doesn't sound like anybody's quitting. They're not giving up on these broadcasts. You know, a couple months from now, we could have some pretty exciting announcements.

So wait, are we gonna continue to do this, Ryan?

I think so. Yeah. You told me I had to. So yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think there's, there's some something special here, we couldn't have made this up and crafted it differently. I want to give great, I mean, we're here to help. Okay, so you just heard from three final teams out of 10. Over the course of a short weekend, they ferociously work and continue to work. And we're seeing traction. And these ideas could be solving deep problems. And the Port Authority, even the Port Authority one is really, really important to the Port Authority to give people access to generate revenue. Even though there is money at the federal level for infrastructure support, the Port Authority's role is to make sure that people have access each and every place not just close down some of the routes that they've had to do over time. So this could really shift the conversation before authority. So you have vaccine access, which everyone knows Pennsylvania's ranking at the bottom of the list, not proud of that at all. And so Matt Clark and your team appreciate the traction and the passion that you've got there. And with them, first responders who have been at the frontline of the pandemic, no less other incidents that have happened in our in our times are really important. So I'm going to give Ryan and Kitt you have anything else that you want to add before we wrap up, and I'll tell everyone about Monday show.

Yeah, I mean, I would love to hopefully by fall, you know, we can have some sort of hybrid event at least and have some in person aspect because I'd love to do another one of these. So Matt, no pressure, just get that that Kovacs out there, make sure we're all vaccinated by then. But I you know, I've had so much fun doing these. We've now done what, two and 10 months, eight months now. There are a lot of fun. And I think adding an in person element will be even more exciting.

Yeah, we'll have to get all the groups together from both hackathons and real. Yeah, so that we can hang out. So hats off to everyone who's helped helped us, I want to give a shout out again to Bank of New York Mellon, CGI, and for supporting us as well. I can't thank them enough. It takes all of them to help us work in the sounds like the mentors were amazing. And thank you to Kitt. Thank you, especially to Ryan on our team to make sure that we're doing what we can took some support on the back end to make this work. I I'm excited, this is a good way to end a Friday with this kind of update only 14 days later. So really excited. Thank you all for joining. I do want to tell you, this Monday, we actually have the infamous sister Linda, she is the President and CEO of the Holy Family Institute. She's amazing, really special things. And at the tech Council, we have been partnered by taking their interns over the many, many years. So we have a little bit of a soft spot for the work that the Holy Family is doing. But you might not want to miss this because there's some really interesting things that they're working on in terms of racial equity and education that she wants to talk about. And she's considered, you know, one of the shining lights in leadership in in Pittsburgh, so I'm really thrilled to have real time to talk to her. So I want to thank all of you stay safe. Have a great weekend. Thank you to these finalists and these winners, they're not even finalists and we are here to help you. And thank you Ryan. Thank you Kitt. Have a great weekend, everyone. Bye, everyone.

Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai