CIC Spring 2012 - Societal Impact

The Societal Impact category is designed to mirror the wide array of projects on campus in Humanitarian Systems, which is one of the 4 initiatives within the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). The IPaT Humanitarian Systems initiative develops powerful approaches for communities to support and sustain each other through the use of novel communication networks and information technologies. Projects range from social media applications for social justice to first response technologies for disaster relief.

A featured goal of this year's Societal Impact category is to make a material contribution to enhance shared transit solutions in the metro Atlanta area. This could include making carpooling and public transit more appealing, or highlighting the challengings of car commuting. Solutions should consider a near term and long term point of view, and should not be limited to existing public transit solutions or road capacity and utilization. Competitive entries in this category can be in the form of applications and services for commuters, transportation planners and policy makers, and transit operators. While the viability judging criteria for entries in this category will focus on the potential material impact the solution presented affords, commercial viability of the solution will also be considered.

A variety of resources, including devices for prototyping, as well as demographic and transportation data will be made available to competitors in this category. Check back soon for detailed information.

For the first time ever, students from other metro Atlanta colleges and universities will be allowed to compete in this category. Check back soon with more info, including campus coordinators, tech talks, access to resources, and team building.

Resources

  • Google Plus Feed for this category
  • Transit Issues presentation
  • Google Resources available for this project
  • Census data for the Atlanta region, split up by County, including Census Tract 2000 data in KML format. Download Here
  • To view .shp files download Google SketchUp with appropriate plugins