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

[Mary Beth Baker]

Josh,

I don't know anything about posting on Hacker News either. I think just
having had this discussion and knowing I'm not alone in my critique of the
original anti-hackfest article is enough for me. I'm going to keep planning
events like International Open Data day and #Learnhackyow because I can
understand the value to the wider community. Opne data Ottawa has even
taken a similar approach and refined each event based on the last.

Thanks for thinking out loud with me.

Mary Beth


On 2 March 2013 17:04, Josh Tauberer <tauberer at govtrack.us> wrote:

>  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> 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*: mapping zoning restrictions<http://bit.ly/13dCJhb>
>  (more<http://bureauphile.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/open-data-day-versus-legal-codes/>),
> graphing public and charter school enrollment<http://i.imgur.com/5qxNdhg.jpg> and
> other education data <http://imgur.com/SnnApCa>, mapping trees<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 world
>  mapped 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 project performance
> data <https://mcc.demo.socrata.com/dashboard/countries> to measuring
> poverty in real time<http://datakind.org/2013/02/datadive-fight-poverty-corruption-world-bank/>
>  using Twitter.
>
> The *open government* projects worked on adding semantic information<http://namespaces.cato.org/catoxml/>to
> legislative documents, comparing legislative documents for similarity<http://stephanis.info/tag/opendataday/>
> ,extracting legal citations<https://github.com/dvogel/pacer-recap-citations>,
> cataloging our government representatives<http://api.demofcracymap.org/#get-involved>at
> the local level, and building “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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