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

[Josh Tauberer]

> Have you seen the Hacker news article going around saying hackathons 
> are bad?

Yeah. There's been a lot of that, and questions like "does open gov do 
any good?", lately.

When Eric and I started planning the event last year, we started with 
low-level, concrete goals like: welcome non-techies, expand the 
community, time-bound the event to a single day. We drew from the 
successes of the previous year, and I think we were also informed by the 
skepticism around hackathons. (The way I phrased the write-up was 
definitely in response to it.) And if solving a real world problem in 8 
hours was impossible, why should that be a goal at all? So we nixed 
that. We didn't care much about meeting the unreasonably high 
expectations of bloggers and journalists.

Anyway... I don't know how Hacker News works. :) Feel free to repost.

- Josh Tauberer (@JoshData)

http://razor.occams.info

On 03/02/2013 08:59 AM, Mary Beth Baker wrote:
> Josh - thanks for the detailed summary. I'm really impressed with 
> everyone's continued energy and follow up summaries.
>
> Have you seen the Hacker news article going around saying hackathons 
> are bad? I think the points you made below are the perfect antidote to 
> that article's author's perspective. Also your wide audience and video 
> project show and tell are the perfect evidence to contradict the 
> article's perspective. Any chance you might share this summary or a 
> version of it on hacker news?
>
> Mary Beth
>
>
>
>
> On 2013-03-02, at 8:34 AM, Josh Tauberer <tauberer at govtrack.us 
> <mailto:tauberer at govtrack.us>> wrote:
>
>> 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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