[January 22, 2015]

Indiana and Texas Square off in a Civic Hackathon Challenge

Today, Indiana and Texas announce the Indiana Texas Challenge, a battle for bragging rights for the best government application to serve citizens. The #hackINvTX Challenge is a contest for the residents of both states to create applications that support and inspire entrepreneurship and digital government innovation, encourage government transparency and open data, and promote interstate collaboration and competition. Each state is presenting two challenges, four in total, with the winner from each state earning $4,000. A grand prize champion, that determines which state wins, will be selected by a national panel from the two challenge winners. The grand prize winner receives an additional $4,000. The competition will start on January 31 and conclude on February 23.

Civic hacking is an opportunity for citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs to collaborate and create, build, and invent new solutions using code, technology, and publicly-released data to solve challenges relevant to neighborhoods, cities, states, or the country.

"This is a chance to encourage our citizens to use their skills to improve government services," said Indiana State Chief Information Officer (CIO) Paul Baltzell. "I believe that the intelligence and skill of Hoosiers and Texans will shine through and they will develop innovative solutions to these problems and potentially turn them into full-blown products. My hope is that some of these teams that form will eventually turn into businesses and bolster the burgeoning tech-scene in Indiana."

Todd Kimbriel, Interim CIO for Texas, said, "We appreciate this Texas/Indiana challenge and welcome the opportunity to promote Open Data and Texas government transparency. We thank the Texas civic developer community for helping us provide citizen access to government information and services anytime, anywhere. Texans are known for their inventiveness and creating opportunities from challenges. I am confident the Texas team will bring forth ideas that are both innovative and useful."

Challenge Entries:

Indiana Department of Environmental Management: Create a centralized, streamlined, and secure platform for receiving, tracking, and collaborating on permit applications. Significant time in creating permits is lost in the hand offs between the agency and its stakeholders. Any system that assists in streamlining the processes and is transparent for users will benefit all.

Indiana Department of Homeland Security: Develop a method to register and create a checklist of available/needed services for Hoosiers visiting a One-Stop-Shop after a disaster.

Texas Department of Family and Protective Services: Provide map-based results and associated information for child-car operations when using different search criteria.

Texas Department of Transportation: Develop a mobile application based on the www.my35.org approach that enables commuters to plan their travel more effectively along with the portability that comes with an ever-expanding mobile device market.

Event Information:

The #hackINvTX Challenge will have a launch event on Saturday, Jan. 31 beginning at 10:00 a.m. ET. The main launch event in Indiana will be on the campus of IUPUI, with satellite events across the state. The event at IUPUI will be in the Informatics (News - Alert) and Communications Technology Complex, 535 West Michigan Street; Room 152.

More details about the hackathon, including the location of the Texas event and rules and full descriptions of the challenges can be found at https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/texas-vs-indiana-challenge.

About Indiana

The State of Indiana has partnered with the Indy Chamber and TechPoint to run the competition for Hoosiers.

The Indy Chamber is the voice of progress and improvement for the Indianapolis region's business community. With membership of nearly 2,500 businesses representing 230,000 employees in the Indianapolis region, the Indy Chamber is leading the effort to strengthen the business climate, improve the state of education, revitalize neighborhoods and enhance the region's workforce. For more information about the Indy Chamber, visit IndyChamber.com.

TechPoint is the hub and accelerator for Indiana's technology ecosystems, connecting and amplifying the tech community via TechPoint.org and events throughout the year, attracting and developing talent via the Xtern and Xpat programs, accelerating startup growth and providing strategy and research.

About Texas.gov

Texas.gov is the official website of the State of Texas (www.texas.gov) and is a collaborative public/private partnership managed by the Department of Information Resources (DIR). Texas.gov helps state and local government entities web-enable their services and operates without tax funds through a partnership between the State and Texas NICUSA, LLC. Texas NICUSA builds, operates, maintains, and markets Texas.gov and is part of eGovernment firm NIC's (NASDAQ: EGOV) family of companies. Since its launch in 2000, Texas.gov has securely processed more than 234 million financial transactions and collected more than $32 billion on behalf of participating entities.

About NIC (News - Alert)

Founded in 1992, NIC (NASDAQ: EGOV) is the nation's leading provider of official government websites, online services, and secure payment processing solutions. The company's innovative eGovernment services help make government more accessible to everyone through technology. The family of NIC companies provides eGovernment solutions for more than 3,500 federal, state, and local agencies in the United States. Forbes has named NIC as one of the "100 Best Small Companies in America" five times, most recently ranked at No.11 (2013), and the company has been included four times on the Barron's 400 Index. Additional information is available at http://www.egov.com.

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