WTCI-TV's Hackanooga team and Project Proximity1 was honored as the "Best Vision for the Future of Chattanooga," an honor that they shared with a team called "Change."  Project Proximity1 is a mobile app concept that WTCI-TV is leading as a community collaboration conceived by board member and investment advisor Ray Ryan of Patten and Patten, "to genuinely use the gig in our backyard to act as an aggregator of local content."

Hackanooga, presented by U.S. Ignite and Mozilla and sponsored by EPB, the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, the National Science Foundation, CO.LAB, Lamp Post Group and Easy Designs, was a 48-hour event that connected experienced web developers to Chattanooga's one-gigabit-per-second Internet speed. 

Nancy Patterson presented WTCI's Project Proximity1 to the crowd of experienced web developers from Chattanooga and around the country, building a team of local professionals who spent 48 hours creating an unfinished prototype of the web-based local digital video content aggregator that WTCI and non-profit partners have been exploring.  Nancy, WTCI board member, wife and mother led the Hackanooga team and is the co-founder of a legal start-up and owns a non-profit consulting business.  Paul Grove, president and CEO of WTCI said, “Nancy has brought a passion and commitment to her service on the board of directors and she and board member Ray Ryan have been instrumental in moving the station toward the goal of bringing innovation in providing quality digital content to the public."

WTCI is Chattanooga's PBS station and serves a 35-county region, striving to educate, engage and inspire citizens by providing quality programming, services and being an active community partner.  U.S. Ignite is a White House initiative that is a federally funded, public-private partnership designed to promote the development of apps and services for ultra-fast broadband networks.   UTC student Hanes Boyd said that the experience “gave him an inside view of what it’s like to develop apps with the best in internet and technological support."

WTCI provided the live streaming services for the Gig Tank event held in August, sharing the Chattanooga experience with an international audience.  Ideas that are created in events like Hackanooga can become submissions for the Mozilla Ignite challenge, a grant opportunity offering $485,000 in awards partnered with mentorship opportunities to help apps get off the ground, it was stated. 

WTCI's Proximity1 team worked from a framework created through a collaboration with community partners to build an app that would create a new category of local content delivered with the speed of the gig pipeline.  WTCI’s team included Hanes Boyd, a student from UTC, local professional developers Christopher Klapp and Andrew Steele from Firma8, Code Journeyman Lee Walker, Tianna Buckwalter of CO.LAB, local developer David Castaneda and Nate Hill from the Chattanooga Public Library. 

The unfinished prototype can be viewed at www.proximity1.com and is represented on Facebook at Proximity1.  Call WTCI at 702-7815 or visit Facebook at WTCI-TV for more information.