Saturday Oakland’s City Hall hosted an all-day event where geeks and concerned residents shared ideas with city leaders about how to improve life in Oakland. And newly-inaugurated mayor Libby Schaaf appeared wearing a “Code for America” jacket, ending the event with a warm thank-you speech that also honored city employees who have helped push for more openness with government data.

The chilly Saturday morning saw over a hundred geeks and city officials strolling across Frank Ogawa Plaza and into City Hall to participate in “City Camp Oakland”. After an open forum suggesting topics, the crowd split into nine different “un-conferences” where participants drive the meeting’s agenda, and all feedback was gathered into actionable items. Four sets of nine sessions were held throughout the day, and the 36 topics covered everything from Police Accountability data and Diversity in Technology to ideas about text messaging service and the web-scraping of PDFs. Many of the session notes were also archived on Google Drive, and the results were fed back to city officials to make sure that all ideas were heard.

“We plastered the grand staircase of City Hall with session notes ideas,” one City Camp organizer remembered on Twitter, posting a photograph showing at least 25 easel-sized sheets of paper. More session-note sheets appeared on the walls around the staircase, as a way to give attendees a glimpse into the event’s progress in real-time. Oakland’s “Building Bridges” room, which usually hosts City Committee meetings, became the site for lively discussions about theft in local stores and increasing civic participation for non-English speakers. Geeks and city experts clustered throughout the City Hall building, continuing conversations begun in the sessions and enjoying catered Mexican food from local restaurateur Tina Tamale.

Six different organizations helped fund and sponsor the event (including the Kapor Center for Social Impact, CivicActions, Airbnb, Two Point Oakland, Kainbigan, and the Parliament bar). But Oakland was just one of four cities hosting a “City Camp” event Saturday, along with San Francisco, Sacramento, and Chattanooga, Tennnessee. OpenOakland, one of the event’s hosts, has also been holding “Civic Hack Nights” every week at City Hall where geeks can contribute to their civic-oriented projects. One speaker argued that if San Francisco is about disruptive innovation, Oakland can build a reputation for its bridging innovation. And just five days after being inaugurated, Oakland’s new mayor Libby Schaaf shared a story about her own personal connection to the world of civic hackers.

Her “Code for America” jacket, she told the audience, dates back several years, when she was just a member of the city council pushing for Oakland as the next city to participate in the program. She was successful — “Code for America” came to Oakland, bringing with them their mission of Open Source software and the power of motivated geeks to make government services more effective. It was an accomplishment she pointed to during her campaign to be elected Oakland’s mayor. But just 12 weeks ago polls found that she was running third, so her victory in November and this week’s inauguration were both sweet and unexpected.

To celebrate, she’d hopped into a friend’s customized vehicle which the Huffington Post described as “a flame-shooting Burning Man art car shaped like a giant snail.” Her campaign manager later suggested it was a great symbol, and Schaaf joked that bureaucrats usually are perceived as slow — and slimy — but that Oakland’s are different. Maybe her turbo-charged, fire-breathing, and technology-enhanced snail could represent Oakland’s original, creative, and high-energy approach to solving problems. She told the audience earnestly that something beautiful can happen when we bring people and technology together.

And then she honored the city’s open data innovators with “Flaming Snail” buttons.