Code and the City – 2016

ICUBE UTM partnering with the City of Mississauga and Sheridan College launched Code and The City Idea Jam on March 5, International Open Data Day. The sold out event welcomed over 80 developers, designers, mappers and information analysts to share ideas on how Mississauga could gain greater awareness and engagement with the community in a digital environment.

The day kicked off with inspirational messages from Mayor Crombie boosting Mississauga’s innovative culture, ICUBE’s start-up coach, Sam Dumcum encouraged participants to ‘unlock their superhero story’ using ICUBE UTM’s pillars of inspiration, innovation and ideation and presenting sponsor SOTI’s Chief Operations Officer, Ron Hassanwalia, wrapped it up with an excellent anecdote of how the ‘connected cow’ demonstrates every industry is ripe for disruption.

Winners and Prizes

After a jam packed day of fostering collaboration between participants, mentors and industry partners, 17 teams presented their solutions using open data to the judges during 3 minute speed pitch sessions. Judges selected the top 3 submissions:

The Librarians won the first place prize of $3,000. They created an idea for a mobile tool that matches service requests between seniors and high school volunteers;
Solutions Bureau won the second place prize of $2,000. Their idea was for an app that helps citizens avoid parking violations; and
A&T won the third place prize of $1,000. Their idea was for an app that provides citizens real time information on the location of buses.

BackgroundWorkshops with top industry professionals included topics on developing a website by UTM Computer Science Professor Arnold Rosenbloom, building geospatial apps using the open data portal and giving data meaning through storytelling. The event also included a marketplace to showcase with ICUBE UTM, Mississauga’s Open Data team, MBEC and Mississauga’s Official Open Data Community. ICUBE UTM teams were on hand to contribute to the collaboration process, but also to recruit developers for their start-ups.

Congratulations to all the participants who took part in the first Code and the City Idea Jam!

Judges for Code and the City included:

Donna Heslin, MSc, PMP, Director ICUBE, Assistant Director, External Relations, University of Toronto Mississauga;
Brian Pham, PhD – Academic Adviser and Professor, Applied Computing, Faculty of Applied Science and Technology;
Nigel Roberts, Manager, Digital Services & Mobility, City of Mississauga;
Shawn Slack, MBA Director of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, City of Mississauga;
Stefano Grossi, Director, Product Development & Architecture, SOTI; and
Robert Baird, President and CEO, LOGIX Data Products.

ICUBE UTM is an ideation based accelerator helping students, faculty and community members with business ideas turn them into viable businesses. By providing access to collaboration/work space on the University of Toronto Mississauga campus, mentorship, and business training ICUBE is where your business concept can come to life.

International Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.