[okfn-labs] Open Data Maker Night

Thu Aug 8 12:48:30 UTC 2013

On 8 August 2013 11:48, Anders Pedersen <anders.pedersen at okfn.org> wrote:

> On 8 August 2013 04:54, Olaf Veerman <olaf.veerman at flipside.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Anders,
>> As we talked about in DC, we're planning to organize a meetup in Lisbon
>> around Open Data on Thursday August 29. On the OFKNLabs page, I read about
>> Open Data Maker Nights and it seems to suit what we want for such a night.
>>
>
> Sounds great!
>
>>
>>
> To focus people's time and energy, I'd like to prepare some tasks for
>> people with different skills and different skill levels. On the data
>> wrangling side, we can propose to take a look at some of the spending data
>> we saw in DC, but I know we'll have some designers + developers as well. Do
>> you have any ideas for this, or can somebody else at OKFN provide us some
>> tips on organizing a Maker Night?
>>
>
Here is the page of instructions:

http://okfnlabs.org/events/open-data-maker/

I will add a bit more to this including some suggestions of the type of
things you can work on - basic idea is you can work on anything open data
related but some concrete suggestions would be useful ;-)

In particular for the London ones we have a google doc we use where we
roughly have:

* Introductions and put your name
* Guides / Introductions for stuff you can work on (people often present at
the start of the evening)
* Scratchpad for people do dump stuff and share links during the evening

Structure of a Open Data Maker Night (one key point is that we're usually
flexible about people dropping in over the evening):

Before the evening:

* Announce ;-) (and ping people who might have an interesting project to
share)
* Prep at least one topic people could work on - my preference is
OpenSpending as people can get from a CSV to a viz within the 1-2h of the
evening
* Prep a scratchpad google doc (template coming soon)

On the evening

* 2m: Introduction, what are Open Data Maker Nights
  * Key point: about "making" (apps and insights) with open data. you don't
need to be a geek - insights as well as apps, plus you can come to learn
  * Give out wifi instructions ;-)
* 5m (depends on number of people): 10-20 second introductions from people
(very short - name etc). Ask people to put themselves down in google doc
scratchpad
* 5-10m: space for people to introduce their project or idea that they may
work on that evening (keep these each to <2m)
* Go! People start "making" usually in groups (people cluster around stuff
they find interesting)
* [Whilst this is going on take pizza orders etc]
* End of evening: [optional] quick 15m wrap-up / report back and discussion
of when to run next one

Rufus

> *

*
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