Open data hack – Dec 3rd, 2011

What is this?

It’s a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.

Several VanHackspace members are involved in Open Data, Open Standards and Open Access.

Who is this event for?
Everyone

If you have an idea for using open data, want to fina an interesting project to contribute towards, or simply want to see what’s happening, then definitely check the Hackfest out. No matter your skillset or interests, there will be plenty of opportunities for you to learn and help the global open data community grow.

You can hack on anything that involves open data
Could be a local or global app, a visualization, proposing a standard for common data sets, scraping data from a government website to make it available for others or even creating your own data catalog of government data. We would like to have a few projects people can work on around the world – these include creating data for Random Hacks of Kindness projects and creating a Mapit web service for your country.

What to Bring
Anything! Bring your laptops, mobile phones, phasers set to stun, etc. but above all, your energy and your brains! We’re trying to make this event very hands on, so feel free to bring all your wacky geektronics so that you can participate in all the fun. Don’t worry if you don’t bring anything since there will still be tons of stuff to do.

Expect to:

• Learn more about open data.
• Find out how your local and national government could do more to release open data.
• Engage local non-profits and companies in the uses of open data for the products and missions
• Meet & network with tons of cool people in your city and around the world.
• Voice your opinion & share your ideas with the people and media attending.
• Find out about apps being created, and get to play around with them as well.
• Help out with parts of the conceptualization, creation, design, advertisement and testing of apps.
• Conduct an open tutorial sessions around using open data,like learning how to customize google maps to show the data you want to show.
• Have lots and lots of fun.

Where:
FoodTree – Directions and sign-up here!

When:
Saturday, Dec 3rd, 2011 – 9am to 6pm

More info
http://www.opendataday.org/