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Annmarie
Levins
@AnnmarieLevins

Annmarie Levins is the General Manager for Microsoft’s Technology & Civic Engagement efforts. She is based in Cambridge, MA, at the New England Research & Development Center (NERD), where she founded Microsoft’s Innovation & Policy Center – New England. She leads teams in Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and the Bay Area to bring the best of Microsoft’s people and technology to help these communities address their most pressing challenges. A native of Massachusetts, Annmarie is well known within the tech community here. She was appointed by Governor Deval Patrick to the Board of the Mass Tech Collaborative and the Governor’s STEM Council and serves on the executive committees of the Mass Tech Leadership Council and the New England Council. She chairs the New England Council’s Technology Committee and serves as Microsoft’s liaison to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

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Guest Post from Microsoft | Investing in the Power of Civic Tech

by Annmarie LevinsShare

This is a sponsored guest post from Microsoft, a capstone sponsor of the 2014 Code for America Summit.

Microsoft was founded on the optimistic belief that technology empowers each of us to do great things. So we are particularly excited about the potential for civic technologists to bring creative solutions to some of the most intractable problems facing our cities. To help foster this potential, we’re supporting gatherings like the 2014 Code for America Summit and investing in challenges and competitions to reward the most innovative and impactful civic technologies.

We were proud to sponsor the “Live” category of the Big Apps NYC Challenge and to join Mayor de Blasio in announcing Heat Seek NYC as the winner. Heat Seek NYC deals with the all too frequent and potentially dangerous situation that occurs when landlords fail to meet the minimum requirements of the city’s heating code, by allowing tenants to install a small, tamper-proof sensor to monitor the temperature in their apartments. It creates a mesh network of all of the sensors in a building and wirelessly transmits temperature readings to a central hub that records the data and compares it to the minimum temperature requirements of the NYC Code. Tenants do not need an internet connection to use a Heat Seek sensor, thus ensuring the availability of this solution even in the most under-served households. This also allows tenants to avoid maintaining hand-written temperature logs and going to housing court. With the City receiving more than 200,000 heating complaints every year, Heat Seek will have a real impact in many people’s lives.

Mayor de Blasio was so impressed with Heat Seek NYC that he quickly arranged for the team to meet with the Commissioner of the NYC Housing and Preservation Department. And others have also recognized Heat Seek’s value: its Kickstarter Campaign met its minimum funding requirement to start manufacturing in a little over a month.

Microsoft was also a judge at the recent Urban Sustainability Apps Competition sponsored by The Chicago Center for Neighborhood Technology and will be the sponsor of the Competition going forward. The Urban Sustainability Apps Competition paired community activists — who bring knowledge of local needs for making communities greener, more livable and more affordable — with social entrepreneurs and developers. The winner, Chicago Green Score, which walked away with free Azure cloud services and Microsoft Developer tools, allows people to rate the “greenness” of their habitat by energy usage and water reclamation. It also provides a map showing green space, farmers markets, bike share locations, and environmental hazards.

In Boston, Microsoft created a new $50,000 Civic Tech Sidecar Prize to be awarded through Mass Challenge, the world’s largest accelerator and challenge program. The prize, which will be given at the annual awards ceremony in Boston on October 29th, is designed to encourage startups to develop technology to improve government services, increase communication between government and citizens, and enhance government effectiveness. We are gratified by the strong interest in the prize and the impressive ideas we’ve seen.

For example, one of the finalists, OpportunitySpace, provides an online marketplace to expose undervalued and often invisible spaces – like vacant lots and surplus government buildings. When these properties are more easily identifiable, creative developers and architects can find them and turn them into valuable community assets. OpportunitySpace is already up and running in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Cumberland in Rhode Island and Louisville, Kentucky, and is working on expanding to Massachusetts.

Like Code for America, Microsoft believes that civic technologists are at the forefront of innovation in solving many of the biggest challenges facing our communities. Our sponsorship of the 2014 Code for America Summit, as well as the aforementioned challenges and competitions represent one way of investing in this innovation. We look forward to finding more ways to collaborate and support the civic tech community.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up at @codeforamerica

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