hackathon

"Got code?" is the theme of the Alameda County Apps Challenge 2013.1, the second in a series of unique day-long events designed to challenge the public to create web and mobile applications using Alameda County open data sets. The Apps Challenge will run from 8:30 am to 7:00 pm on Saturday, April 27, 2013 at Berkeley High School, one block from the Downtown Berkeley BART. » Read more

With almost 30 years of active development under its belt, BRL-CAD is believed to be the second oldest open source codebase in the world that’s still under active development (VistA, the EHR of the Veterans Administration being the oldest). It has also been the primary tri-service solid modeling CAD system used by the U.S. military to model weapons systems for vulnerability and lethality analyses.

On February 23, I participated in my first hackathon event; not a coding event as typical of computer programmers, but an education hackathon—a "Course Sprint" where a group of 14 individuals (educators, open science advocates, community members, and students) collaborated to design and build an open, online course, An Introduction to Open Science and Data, for the School of Open on P2PU.

Creative Commons hosted the event at their office in Mountain View, CA and invited both face-to-face and remote participants, of which I was one of four remote. The event was held in support of Open Data Day to raise awareness and involve communities worldwide in exploring how to liberate, promote, and publish open data.

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Code Across America is scheduled for February 22-24. It will be a weekend of community building and moving the needle for more openness in local governments across the United States.

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Open Colorado is announcing the third annual CityCamp Colorado unconference scheduled for Friday, October 26, 2012. The unconference will bring together people to share ideas that aim to enhance government transparency, citizen participation, and accountability. Ultimately, these goals look to enhance the citizen experience and foster a more healthy, livable community. » Read more

(Mary Anne Masterson and Jay Nath co-authored this article.)

The San Francisco Mayor's Office of Innovation recently piloted an "unhackathon" which attracted over 80 designers, technologists and business pros, all collaborating quickly and intensively to create viable solutions for the City's taxi distribution and transit communication problems. This process, built on the central tenets of design thinking, proved as successful in innovating city management as it has for private industry. » Read more

What started with a unanimous vote to adopt an open source resolution eventually became a long-term commitment to the open source way. How many of you have had an elected official attend a citizen-lead event? Probably some of you. But how many of you have had your entire city or town council attend an unconference?

At a recent open government unconference, all city council members—including the mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina—attended some or all of the event. Their attendance wasn't a requirement—and it wasn’t a political drive-by. It was genuine, natural. And some of them got knee-deep in the “code,” competing in the civic hackathon. » Read more

With the sheer number of civic hackathons starting to reach a critical mass, some are asking whether the energy and drive embodied by these events can be directed to reusing existing applications or projects started at earlier events.

This is an important issue, as some projects worked on at civic hacking events aren’t actively pursued after the event is over. Is there an opportunity to better focus the energy and talents of civic hackers to reuse existing applications, or to take the work from previous hackathons further? » Read more

Not one, but three upcoming events will bring more open government to Australia over the course of a week. GovHack, GovCamp, and GovJam will collectively allow citizens to interact with the public sector to collaborate, innovate, and share--advancing Gov 2.0 by using government data in new ways. » Read more

This post originally appeared on the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Blog. You can follow updates from the Cooney center via facebook, and twitter. » Read more