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Psst! Hey buddy! Want to hack on a little open municipal data from Portland?

Rick Turoczy on April 30, 2010

So, as you may have heard, the City of Portland has opened up their data to outside developers. And they’ve been running the CivicApps contest to encourage participation. As part of that effort, they had planned to hold a hackathon—CiviCode Day—this weekend. But those plans changed.

Now you know as well as I do that you don’t want to get a bunch of developers all riled up to code and then pull the rug out from under them. I mean, you’re courting mutiny or anarchy or some other -y kind of word. And that’s why they’re going to be hacking anyway. Unofficially of course.

The official CiviCode Day is postponed for a bit, but why not meet up and talk about what you’re doing with local data sets anyhow? We’ll do some informal show & tell for anyone with a project already started, then people can team up to explore the data or work on app ideas.

Just what kind of data is available for your hacking pleasure? Well, there are more than 100 open datasets from the City of Portland and TriMet at your disposal. So you can get pretty creative.

The WhereCamp PDX folks and the Open Source Bridge folks are helping spread the word. So it should be a great gathering of great minds.

So why don’t I tell you where and when? Okay. I will.

The unofficial meetup will be held at Nedspace Old Town, starting at 10 AM. For more information, check the Calagator entry for the meetup.

But you didn’t hear that from me.

(Image courtesy Igal Koshevoy. Used under Creative Commons.)

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy

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  8. Edwin Knuth June 2, 2010 at 1:54 am

    Hello Rick,

    Just wanted to let you know that the civicapps organizers held a two hour meeting last week. It was pretty awesome, although I was surprised that there weren’t very many traditional gis type people at the meeting.

    It seems like this could be an excellent way to compare open source and closed geo applications and platforms.

    Thanks!
    Ed

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