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 Building Energy Benchmarking Works: A Complete Guide 2026
Learn how building energy benchmarking works, from data collection and normalization to scores and practical steps for improving performance over time in…
How Bus Rapid Transit Differs From Light Rail (October 2026)
How bus rapid transit differs from light rail: compare vehicles, speed, capacity, stops, costs, flexibility, and the best fit for each corridor.
How Micromobility Data Sharing Works: A Practical Guide 2026
Learn how micromobility data sharing works in , from operator data and APIs to privacy, standards, city use cases, and practical implementation…
How Traffic Congestion Pricing Works: A City Guide (2026)
How traffic congestion pricing works in : zone design, vehicle charges, exemptions, enforcement, and where the money goes, with examples from London…
How to Build a Transit Arrival App With Open Data (October 2026)
How to build a transit arrival app with open data: find GTFS feeds, decode GTFS-Realtime, compute live arrivals and ship a tested…
What GTFS Data Is and How to Use It: A Practical Guide (2026)
What GTFS data is and how to use it: which files sit inside a feed, how to load schedules, routes and stops,…
What a City Chief Innovation Officer Actually Does (October 2026)
What a city chief innovation officer actually does: sets targets, tests better service delivery, and works with residents and partners to scale…
What a City CTO Does Day to Day: Roles and Duties (2026)
Learn what a city CTO does day to day, from aligning technology with public priorities to leading teams, managing risk, and delivering…
How Real Time Transit Data Feeds Work: A Simple Guide 2026
Learn how real time transit data feeds work, from vehicle locations and arrival predictions to APIs, quality checks, and app integration for…
How to Get a Pilot Program with a City Agency (October 2026)
Learn how to get a pilot program with a city agency: pick one specific problem, build evidence, agree on metrics, and turn…
How to Sell Software to City Governments: A Playbook (2026)
Learn how to sell software to city governments: map the buying committee, quantify public value, clear security review, and run a pilot…
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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.