Are you a fan of the hackathon concept? A hackathon is typically a government sponsored event designed to engage the community, bring developers, hackers, and mashup artists together, introduce them to open data products, tools and resources, and then let the brainstorming and hacking begin – quite often the coffee, redbull, pizza and aspirin are provided to attendees!
This month the Government of B.C Canada and their newly created DataBC effort is planning a hackathon, the first ever from Data BC, the Government’s open data initiative. The event invites anyone from the public who enjoys working with public data products to participate. Ideally, those who are web developers, programmers, writers and the like will get most benefit from the event although anyone is invited to participate – I’d suggest that people who are familiar with the “un-conference” format would be most comfortable and those who aren’t should realize that a loosely structured event with much “audience” participation and interaction is needed in order for the event to be truly a valuable experience. For an idea on the kinds of data available to hack I suggest you take a look at http://www.data.gov.bc.ca/ – a new initiative from the B.C Government – data products include school scores, fish population data, public trails, and much more.
This first Hackathon will take place August 27 in Vancouver
Details Here and see also http://www.opendatabc.ca/ and http://www.data.gov.bc.ca/