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Great American Hackathon 2009

Page history last edited by Joe Germuska 15 years, 2 months ago

On Sunday, 13 December 2009, members and friends of Open Government Chicago met at Columbia College to participate in Sunlight Labs "Great American Hackathon '09".

 

Most folks worked on a Chicago TIF data explorer application based around data acquired by the Chicago Reader for their story "Shedding Light on the Shadow Budget". Some folks worked on a system to track problem potholes via Twitter.

 

 

What's this all about?

(This was an adhoc clarification of the meeting's goals which might be useful input for boilerplate sometime)

From the OpenGov mailing list:

 "As an advocate for open government, I would like to support this cause; however, I'm not sure what this is. Can you provide more detail than the web site offers?"

 

Good question. This reminds me that much of the world has a very different idea of what "hackers" and "hacking" mean than I have. For starters, "hackers" aren't bad guys or pirates. They're passionate pragmatic craftspeople who relish doing interesting work and doing it with style.

 

A hackathon is a time for people who share common interests to come together and get stuff done. They emerge from the open source software world, where they are often used to concentrate focus on bigger challenges like adding a major new feature or officially making a new release. The real-time interaction provides focus and improves relationships between folks who may know each other mostly via the internet.

 

The folks at Sunlight Labs have been pushing the idea of adapting the hackathon spirit to civic technology and open government activism. They have organized hackathons in conjunction with several tech conferences. I worked with a couple of dozen folks for a couple of days in March after PyCon (the Python programming language conference). It was a great chance to meet like-minded people and learn more about open government and technology. (Coincidentally, it also put me on the road to my current job, as I met my team lead at the event.)

 

As noted, the idea of a hackathon comes from the open source software world, but there's no reason this needs to be a purely technical thing. Folks could come together to write a manifesto or develop an action plan, or to design a flyer campaign. People could collaboratively critique a government website and draft a recommendation about how it could be better. They could research grant funding opportunities, or just make time for a personal research project, like adapting this neat trick for easily visualizing county- by-county data on a map

 

So, in short, if you have time and interest, you can come to a hackathon and find something to do. If you have a project in mind, you can work on it on your own, but enjoy having like-minded folks nearby for when you need a break, or maybe a second opinion. Or you can start pitching it and planning around it in hopes that some other folks will come looking for something to help out with.

 

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