hackathon - Page number 2

For a 24 hour period, on January 20-21, 2012, starting at 5 p.m., a mix of programmers and entrepreneurs--partnered with City and County of Honolulu officials and armed with an broad array of government data--will come together to develop applications designed to improve the day-to-day lives of Honolulu residents. » Read more

2011 was a great year for open government. Whether you're at the grassroots level in your community or battling political red tape and changing or creating policies, a lot happened in 2011 to advance open government. As we did last year, we wanted to take a moment and reflect on what's happened this year.

We've seen a lot in 2011: CityCamps, Hackathons, and other events where people come together and make progress. They open data, create applications, form communities of purpose, and hold our governments accountable and make them more accessible. » Read more

Guest post by Granicus.

Granicus is partnering with CityCampSF to host a 24-hour Open Government Hackathon in San Francisco, December 11-12^th at Granicus Headquarters. The event is bringing together developers and other creative professionals to build applications that deliver valuable resources to the community and help governments run smarter, more transparent operations. » Read more

A number of things have started to really come together for this Saturday, Dec 3rd. I've noticed a number of new cities being tweeted about (hello Kuala Lumpur & Oakland!) and others adding themselves to the wiki. Indeed, we seem to be above 40 cities. It is hard to know how many people will be showing up in each given city, but in Vancouver I know that we already over 20 registered, while in Ottawa they are well above 40. If other cities have similar numbers it's a great testament to the size of the community out there interested in playing with open government data.

A few thoughts to share with people as we get ready for the big day. » Read more

Every time I come to The Syracuse Tech Garden there is always something new and exciting. This time around Todd Park, chief technology officer (CTO) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services(HHS) spoke to the upstate New York community in a talk titled Unlocking the power of data, IT, and innovation to improve health.

Park first got onto my radar late one night when I was trolling CSPAN around 4 a.m.. It was the first time I heard the words 'open source' mentioned on CSPAN, and I was more than excited to see the genuine article. Mr. Park did not disappoint. » Read more

Last year, with only a month of notice, a small group passionate people announced we'd like to do an international open data hackathon and invited the world to participate.

We were thinking small but fun. Maybe 5 or 6 cities.

We got it wrong. » Read more

Personal Democracy Forum‘s TechPresident recently published a post on the drawbacks of "civic hackathons" – weekends where, generally, developers and designers set out to solve city problems through coding and rapid prototyping in the course of 48 hours or less. This post, from TechPresident Associate Editor Nick Judd, was followed up by a very well-written article from Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar highlighting the importance of realizing sustainability, community, and civic value beyond a single weekend of hacking and prototyping civic solutions. » Read more

I've found myself hanging out more and more on GovLoop lately. It's a social network for the government community focused on connecting people and sharing information. It boasts more than 45,000 members, and I'm happy to be a part of the community. I first learned about GovLoop at a CityCamp event earlier this year. Now that I've become more active in the community, I wanted to share a few topics from GovLoop that you might find interesting. » Read more

Read part 1 of this story about launching a weekend course to teach college students how to get involved in open source projects.

After Saturday's classroom-style work, we used Sunday for an open projects day, where students could drop in and get help contributing to a project. Perhaps because we didn't force the students to commit, only about twenty students came. » Read more

From Blake Ross to Linus Torvalds, students are credited with major achievements in the open source community. But that's not the picture Yuvi Masory painted as he sat across the table from me at an OpenHatch meetup in Philadelphia.

» Read more