[open-data-day] Patting yourself on the back, sharing stories & an apology

Thu Dec 8 06:22:25 GMT 2011

Hello all,

I've created a write-up for the Vancouver event

http://substance.io/lukec/vancouver-open-data-hack-day-2011/

(Plain-text version below)

Luke

Open Data Day Hack Report from Vancouver:

Our local organizer mysteriously dropped out at the last minute, so I
had to fill in.
The hackathon started around 9am at the FoodTree offices, and went on
throughout the day.  We had about 50 people show, the bulk of which
were for hacking on Food related Open Data with the FoodTree people.

After a few words in the morning, we broke off into 3 groups.  The
Food folks split into a technical team and a design team.  You can
find some open food code here:
https://github.com/Open-Food/Open-Food-Standard

Everyone else came together to work on a few different open data projects.

The FoodTree hosts organized a delicious Lunch and Dinner for hackers
and provided great wifi and location too!

Big thanks to David Eaves for catalyzing this global event!

Below are my highlights for the hackathon.

Bicycle accident dataSection from ICBC
Inspired by the local community cycling group, David requested 5 years
of bicycle accident data from ICBC.  @ericp and ngriffiths each worked
on different approaches to analyzing the data.

Eric will blog about his soon, Nathan's can be found here:
http://geocommons.com/maps/122432

Adopting Trees
David's been really excited about about porting the Adopt-a-hydrant
tool to adopt trees in Vancouver.  Some progress was made on it, and
reps from the Parks Board came by excited about working with our open
data community.

Recollect Waterloo
I heard that the Region of Waterloo was hustling to get an open data
portal up in time for ODHD, and they succeeded!  One of their first
datasets was their garbage, recycling, and green waste collection
schedules.  I thought I'd try to reciprocate their good work by
importing the data into Recollect, the pickup reminder service I've
been running the past few years.

This task proved to be the most difficult out of any municipality to
date, which was good because it stretched our model and forced us to
think through some design choices.

Unfortunately, my GIS-foo wasn't up-to-snuff, and I couldn't get the
data into the format I needed.  On the positive side, it clarified how
to solve this problem in the future, and gave some feedback to the
Waterloo folks.

Max Ogden's gut
On Open Data Hack Day Eve, in what I hope becomes a tradition in our
community, the man with the Big Red Beard (@MaxOgden) created a
present for us called 'gut'.

http://maxogden.com/#blog/gut-hosted-open-data-filets

gut is a method to convert between various open-data file formats.
Say KML to geoJSON, or XLS to CSV.  It hooks these converters up to
the web, so that everybody doesn't need to have these tools
themselves.  Instead, we can just use these web services.

I love HTTP, so when I heard about Max's gut I almost danced around
the room 418 style.  As soon as the clock struck midnight in Vancouver
I started hacking on hooking up some amazing tools from CPAN as gut
services.  After a few hours of hacking I released
http://sheets.recollect.net/ which is a gut interface for converting
spreadsheet data into CSV or JSON.

I wasn't the only one excited about gut, @datalaundry started building
a Shape to KML or Shape to geoJSON converter by building a web
interface around some GIS tools he uses for his work on Open Data in
the Northwest Territories.

Guest Hackers & Hacker Gues
We had lots of people stop by to check it out the hackathon(s),
including people from the Parks Board, local tech companies and even
Minister Margaret MacDiarmid (of Labour, Citizens' Services and Open
Government).

The Minister spent a long time with our open data group, engaging in
deep discussions and showed a real interest to learn what it was we
were actually doing.