[open-data-day] The Open Knowledge Foundation's events on Open Data Day 2013 – wrapped-up!

[Josh Tauberer]

Here's what happened in DC:

http://razor.occams.info/blog/2013/03/02/open-data-day-2013-hackathon-recap/

Over*150*developers, data scientists, social entrepreneurs, government 
employees, and other open data enthusiasts participated in our event, 
first at a kickoff Friday night at Google’s DC headquarters and then at 
the Saturday session at The World Bank. Participants worked on local DC 
issues, global open source mapping, world poverty, and open government. 
Here are some quick links:

    *Video: *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_LcBQuaM1s

    *Photos:*One
    <http://www.flickr.com/photos/katmandoo/sets/72157632877567408/>|Two
    <http://www.flickr.com/photos/87925482@N08/sets/72157632889737965/>

    *Tumblr highlights: *http://www.tumblr.com/blog/opendatadaydc

    *Storified tweets: *http://storify.com/worldbank/opendataday

Our approach to the hackathon was a little different than many others. 
Our goals were to strengthen the open data community, to foster 
connections between people and between projects, and to emphasizes 
problem statements over prototypes and solutions. There was no beer or 
pizza at our hackathon, no competitions, and no pressure to produce 
outputs. Participants came motivated and stayed focused without needing 
to be treated like brogrammers. This created a positive, welcoming, and 
highly productive environment.

In the morning Eric Mill (Sunlight Foundation/@konklone 
<https://twitter.com/konklone>) ran a several-hours-long*tutorial on 
open data*for about 40 participants. Some were new to coding. Others 
were project managers (inside and outside of government) who wanted to 
learn more about what open data is all about from the ground up. Eric 
walked the participants through exploring APIs through the web browser, 
using command-line tools, and basic scripting — a very concrete way to 
explain the benefits of adding structure to data.

Several projects focused on*local DC issues*: mappingzoning restrictions 
<http://bit.ly/13dCJhb> (more 
<http://bureauphile.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/open-data-day-versus-legal-codes/>), 
graphing public and charterschool enrollment 
<http://i.imgur.com/5qxNdhg.jpg> and other education data 
<http://imgur.com/SnnApCa>, mappingtrees 
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/gwirth/sets/72157632841459992/>by species, 
and building adatabase of social service providers 
<https://groups.google.com/group/districtcommons/subscribe>.

A large team of map hackers worked on*mapping Kathmandu* in Open Street 
Map to aid disaster response, and with their collaborators around the 
worldmapped over 7,000 building footprints 
<http://mapbox.com/blog/mapping-kathmandu-stats/>.

*Global poverty and international development*was the focus of several 
other projects, from building APIs for international development 
projectperformance data 
<https://mcc.demo.socrata.com/dashboard/countries>tomeasuring poverty in 
real time 
<http://datakind.org/2013/02/datadive-fight-poverty-corruption-world-bank/>using 
Twitter.

The*open government*projects worked on addingsemantic information 
<http://namespaces.cato.org/catoxml/>to legislative documents, comparing 
legislative documents forsimilarity 
<http://stephanis.info/tag/opendataday/>,extracting legal citations 
<https://github.com/dvogel/pacer-recap-citations>, cataloging 
ourgovernment representatives 
<http://api.demofcracymap.org/#get-involved>at the local level, 
andbuilding “devops” tools <http://github.com/OpenDataDevOps/minus>for 
rapid deployment of VMs that might be useful in government or for open 
data researchers.

And there were other projects that don’t fit into any of those 
categories, like building Python tools for creating*education curricula*,

The event was organized by me (Josh Tauberer/GovTrack/@JoshData 
<https://twitter.com/JoshData>), Eric Mill (Sunlight 
Foundation/@konklone <https://twitter.com/konklone>), Katherine Townsend 
(USAID/@DiploKat <https://twitter.com/DiploKat>), Dmitry Kachaev 
(Presidential Innovation Fellow/Millennium Challenge Corporation/@kachok 
<https://twitter.com/kachok>), Sam Lee (The World Bank/@OpenNotio 
<https://twitter.com/OpenNotion>n), and Julia Bezgacheva (@ulkins 
<https://twitter.com/ulkins>/The World Bank).

Thanks go to The World Bank especially, and to Google, the participants 
that helped out with registration in the morning, and to everyone who came!

This was DC’s second open data day. Our first was on Dec. 3, 2011 and 
was co-hosted by POPVOX (Josh Tauberer) and Wikimedia DC (Katie 
Filbert). See what we did on the post-event recap at 
https://www.popvox.com/features/opendataday2011. Participants then 
worked on improving access to U.S. law, scanning federal spending for 
anomalies following Benford’s Law, understanding farm subsidy grants, 
building local transit apps, and keeping Congress accountable. Only 
about half of the participants were programmers, but everyone found a 
way to be involved.

It was also DC’s second international development data day. The last one 
was held on December 9, 2012 in the lead-up to the Development DataJam 
hosted by White House’s Office of Science & Technology. Those events 
primarily served as ideation jams to bring together issue area experts 
and data experts to develop new ideas and partner for new solutions. 
Experts were sought out to inform the discussions, but anyone with an 
interest in open data in development were welcomed and participated.

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