The civic-tech practitioner’s journal
Practical guides for the people building city apps
Smart City App Hack is a working journal on open city data, hackathons and the civic apps that come out of them — written for developers, civic-tech staff and the municipal teams who have to keep them running.
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Latest guides
How to Reduce Duplicate Reports in a Citizen Reporting App 2026
Learn how to reduce duplicate reports in a citizen reporting app with geofencing, matching rules, verification, and smart workflows for city teams…
How Open311 Standards Work in 2026: A Practical Guide
See how open311 standards work in - the six GeoReport v2 methods, the core data model, submission types and what stays local…
How to Integrate with a 311 Service API: Guide (2026)
Learn how to integrate with a 311 service API, map service requests, authenticate securely, handle errors, and launch a reliable civic app…
How a 311 System Works Behind the Scenes, Explained (2026)
How a 311 system works behind the scenes in : intake, service codes, routing, work orders, case tracking, city integrations, and performance…
How to Write an Ethics Checklist for Municipal AI Teams 2026
Learn how to write an ethics checklist for municipal AI teams (), covering fairness, privacy, transparency, accountability and public impact.
How to Run a Community Technology Review Board (2026)
How to run a community technology review board: write the charter, recruit members, score proposals in open meetings, record decisions, publish results…
How Surveillance Technology Oversight Ordinances Work 2026
How surveillance technology oversight ordinances work in , from definitions and approval to public records, audits, remedies, and the limits of local…
How Predictive Policing Models Are Built (2026)
Learn how predictive policing models are built, from data collection and feature engineering to risk scoring, bias testing, deployment and oversight in…
How Algorithmic Bias Affects Public Services (October 2026)
Learn how algorithmic bias affects public services, who feels the harm, and what agencies, vendors and residents can do in to make…
How to Store User Location Data Safely: Practical Guide 2026
Learn how to store user location data safely with minimization, encryption, retention controls, access limits, consent, audits, and practical safeguards.
Why Civic Apps Should Have a Data Retention Policy 2026
Why civic apps should have a data retention policy: pick a defensible period for each type of city data in , and…
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A note from the editors
Smart City App Hack exists because the useful parts of civic technology rarely get written down — the municipal API that finally returns clean data, the hackathon weekend that turns into a pilot, the app a transit team can still maintain a year later. So we write them down, step by step, with the awkward middle left in. Whatever you are building for your city, we hope you leave here knowing the next move.
The Smart City App Hack editors
About the site
A journal for civic builders
This is a reading site about smart city technology and civic app development: open municipal data, hackathons and events, urban mobility, and the apps that residents actually use. It starts with the hands-on how-to work and widens into the wider urban-innovation picture as the questions get bigger.