– Hackathoning Government

Update 08-25-10:   I’ll write another post on the results of the Tinkerstorm, but the Tropo Blog has a list of results and awards here.

“Hacking” has a bad connotation. We’re going to change that in Seattle this weekend with the Open Government Hackathon. The Hackathon is the culmination of of Geek Week here in Seattle. Yeah, yeah most of you non-Puget-Sounders think every week is Geek Week in Seattle, complete with nerdish denizens such as Microsofties, Googlers, Socratians, IBMers, Tropons, Amazonians, Pirilloians and now even Facebookers.

Geek Week is the creation of local Geek King Chris Pirillo. I envy Chris, with his 85,326 Twitter followers compared to my mere 2,232 followers. We both come from humble backgrounds in Iowa, and made it to Seattle to seek our futures in the Pacific Northwest.

Chris found his future and part of it is Geek Week and Gnomedex. The 10th Annual Gnomedex “Conference of Inspiration and Influence” is happening on Friday and Saturday, August 20th and 21st.

As Gnomedex winds down on Saturday at 5:00 PM, the Open Government Hackathon winds up. The Hackathon is sponsored by two phenomenal local tech companies, Socrata and Tropo. Socrata has made its name making data open and transparent, most notably with data.gov and data.seattle.gov (well, and a few other sites).

Developers will converge on the Edgewater Hotel on (duh) Seattle’s waterfront. They’ll have 24 hours to use government datasets to create interesting applications. At 5:00 PM on Sunday, we’ll be judging applications for those which are most useful, interesting, unique or maybe just cool. There will be a number of prizes – hackers will get codes for some Amazon Web Services usable to deploy and test apps there and other prizes include a Flip HD camera, year membership in Amazon Pro and even an iPad – gee, if Microsoft or Google or Facebook made a nice slate computer, maybe that could be the prize. Perhaps next year!

Read more about the Hackathon on Chris Pirillo’s blog here, or the Socrata blog here, or the Tropo blog here.

In any case, it will be wonderful to see what sorts of applications the hackers develop, all with the intent not of hacking into government, but rather of making data held by government more accessible to citizens, residents and the people government serves.

Note: I’m especially proud of data.seattle.gov, with over a hundred cool datasets of information like fire department 911 calls, active building permits, and public toilets. That’s an initaitive of Mayor Mike McGinn and the City of Seattle’s Department of Information Technology, and we’ll be adding a lot more data to the site over the next couple of months, including police crime statistics, police 911 calls, and business licenses. You can already view crimes and 911 calls plotted by neighborhood on My Neighborhood Map here, powered by Microsoft’s Bing Maps and the employees of City government. The data feed of this information to data.seattle.gov will be active soon.