December 4 2010 was the first International Open Data Hackathon Day. Originially instigated by David Eaves @daeaves and some of his friends, it saw people in over 63 cities, in 25 countries, and on 5 continents participate.
Herb Lainchbury @herblainchbury organized Victoria's event. Here's his recap of the event.
"Yesterday's Victoria hackathon was a great success. Much gratitude to David Eaves! Big huge thank you to Nelson Lah @nlah and CGI Victoria @cgivic for providing us an awesome space here in Victoria, an endless supply of coffee, snacks and pizza. And mostly, thanks to everyone who came out. We had over 30 people, started and/or advanced 8 projects!
We are in the process moving the new projects to public URLs so folks can see them.
The projects we worked on are:
Eatsure Victoria (status: working demo)
RideNow - crowd sourced transit stops/schedules application (status: semi-working prototype)
OpenLegislature.ca - fork of openparliament.ca for provincial legislatures (status: instance running, data being compiled)
Waterly.ca - (status: new watering jurisdictions KML files created to be added)
Victoria instance of VanTrash (status: prototype)
Rezoning Notifier - notifies residents of rezoning appications and displays on a map (status: data collected)
MyRep - app that displays who represents you at every government level given a location (status: data partially collected)
OpenDataBC Catalogue - completed list of BC public bodies for the catalogue (status: complete)
The list of projects advanced or completed worldwide is being posted to the wiki here: http://www.opendataday.org/wiki/Opendata_Day_Projects"
Hackathons aren't just for developers and geeks. The Victoria group is planning another event for early 2011 and would love to see more citizens involved. After all - we are the end users of all the applications being worked on.
So, send a message to Herb and ask to be included on the group email list. If you've got ideas of apps you think might be useful - let them know.
