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

Mon Mar 4 02:21:32 GMT 2013

Good idea!

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 9:10 PM, David Eaves <david at eaves.ca> wrote:

> Eric, you were asking on the open gov lost about open data in Japan. There
> were at least six open data day events in Japan this year so it might be
> worth asking this list?
>
> Dave
>
> --
> www.eaves.ca
> @daeaves
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 2013-03-03, at 5:43 PM, Eric Mill <eric at sunlightfoundation.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>>>
>>>  _______________________________________________
>>> open-data-day mailing list
>>> open-data-day at lists.okfn.org
>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-data-day
>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-data-day
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> open-data-day mailing list
>> open-data-day at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-data-day
>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-data-day
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Developer | sunlightfoundation.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-data-day mailing list
> open-data-day at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-data-day
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-data-day
>
>

-- 
Developer | sunlightfoundation.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-data-day/attachments/20130303/5df22b6b/attachment-0001.htm>