With 20+ divisions and offices offering a wide variety of services, the City of Memphis has invested in helping residents find what they are looking for with resources like 211 and the Connect Crew. As part of Mayor Young’s Good Governance transition team recommendations, Memphis is developing a “City Hall on the Go” model to meet residents where they are, offering hands-on ways to refer Memphians to the right resources at the right time that range from government basics like paying taxes and making 311 service requests to finding critical safety net services like food and housing. Yet City staff and residents still experience challenges navigating these services that we believe hackers can help us solve. For one, the City can’t always offer live staff support when residents need help overnight or when staff can’t be present in every neighborhood at the same time. Another recurring challenge is keeping resource directories up to date that take all City and County agencies’ services into account as well as hundreds of nonprofit and community-based resources many residents rely on.

Call to Action:
For our 2025 Hackathon, we are seeking hackers’ ideas and technical expertise on how to build user-friendly, interactive tools so residents can serve themselves when looking for resources and how to improve the accuracy and completeness of local resource directories on an ongoing basis. These solutions have the power to improve both City staff’s and residents’ capacity to connect to the right resources when they are needed most and also significantly reduce the risk of residents being referred to services that are no longer available or not accessible for their needs.

Potential Hackathon Topics
Potential Hackathon projects to pursue include (but aren’t limited to) the following, and we highly recommend that teams focus on 1 type of service sector to keep the scope manageable during the Hackathon:
*Prototyping chatbots and other types of interactive user features to quickly connect residents to the right resources
*Prototyping website features/wireframe designs to make resource directories more user-friendly for residents—or staff referring residents to resources
*Developing automated or more efficient processes to verify and update local resource directories to maintain accuracy (ex: confirming which services are still active, hours of operation, locations, eligibility requirements)
*Using new data mining/collection techniques to flag local services and organizations that may have changed or become inactive to update local resource directories

Hacker Skill Sets Needed
*Data analysis/data science
*User experience & user-centered design
*AI and machine learning
*App and web tool development
*Project management
*Communications, marketing and design