Today was the International Open Data Day Hackathon and I helped coordinate a group of people in Ann Arbor, MI to participate pretty last minute. There was a post to the School of Information’s (my alma mater) mailing list saying, effectively, “Short notice but this looks cool.” I replied with “Yes, short notice, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything!”
With a quick rallying of the troops, notably Eli Neiburger of the Ann Arbor District Library and Ryan Burns of a2geeks, we had a free space to have the event with free wifi and electricity (what else do you need?). I sent out the announcement that same day (Nov. 29th, 5 days ago). Even with the last minuteness, end of semesterness (Ann Arbor is a college town), and the holidays right around the corner we had a really good turn out. Including myself there were 8 people in attendance.
What we did:
- Added some datasets to ckan.net, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network.
- Explored what datasets other cities offered (like San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Vancouver).
- Most importantly we began building our own webapp using some of the data from the Ann Arbor data sets.
This project has A) a name (CitySpender), B) a git repository, C) a license, D) and code that does stuff that isn’t yet checked into the repository :)
All in all I think this was a big success. Met some great new people who I’ll continue to work with on this project (we’ll be at the next Coffee House Coders in Ann Arbor this Wednesday night).
Expect more updates…..