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

[Eric Mill]

I just put up a little something myself about Open Data Day, talking a bit
about criticisms of hackathons:
http://konklone.com/post/open-data-day-dc-2013

I was really happy with the day!

-- Eric


On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Mary Beth Baker <maribethbaker at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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>>
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-- 
Developer | sunlightfoundation.com
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