---
title: 'Psst! Hey buddy! Want to hack on a little open municipal data from Portland?'
date: '2010-04-30T13:03:14-07:00'
type: post
word_count: 367
char_count: 2411
tokens: 478
categories:
  - Events
  - Hackers
  - hacking
  - Open
  - Oregon
  - Portland
tags:
  - civicapps
  - Data
  - hack
  - Municipal
  - Open
  - 'open source bridge'
  - pdx
  - Portland
  - WhereCamp
---

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

So, as you may have heard, the [City of Portland has opened up their data to outside developers](http://siliconflorist.com/2009/09/30/portland-oregon-open-city-officially-embracing-open-data-open-source/ "Portland Oregon joins the ranks of the open cities officially embracing open data and open source"). And they’ve been running the [CivicApps](http://civicapps.org/ "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](http://calagator.org/events/1250458593 "Unofficial CivicApps Meetup").

> 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](http://siliconflorist.com/2010/04/20/open-data-civicapps-101-datasets-data-geeking-portland-oregon/ "101 open datasets for your geeking pleasure") at your disposal. So you can get pretty creative.

The [WhereCamp PDX folks](http://www.wherecamppdx.org/2010/04/civicapps-meetup-this-saturday/ "Unofficial CivicApps Meetup this Saturday") and the [Open Source Bridge folks](http://opensourcebridge.org/blog/2010/04/unofficial-civicapps-meetup-this-saturday/ "Unofficial CivicApps Meetup this Saturday") 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](http://calagator.org/events/1250458593 "Unofficial CivicApps meetup").

But you didn’t hear that from me.

*([Image courtesy Igal Koshevoy](http://www.flickr.com/photos/igalko/4502269450/ "Hacking"). Used under Creative Commons.)*