Open Iowa Hackathon?

[Mark S.]

Hey everyone,

We have the opportunity to participate in the Open Iowa Hackathon the
same weekend we were thinking of having our next event. This is an
all weekend hackathon that will be occurring all over Iowa with the
aim of creating projects that make use of public or government data.
It would be something like a startup weekend only focused on using
public data. It would start Friday the 27th in the evening and run
through demos on Sunday evening, the 29th and probably be at The Vault
in Cedar Rapids.

Our options are basically to participate in this event in place of our
event, to hold our event concurrently in The Vault at the normal time
and focus on open data, or to hold our event independently. If we
still hold our event it'll be in the Busy Coworking space in Iowa City
on the 28th.

I'm very interested in the open data movement so I'm going to try to
make the hackathon happen, but I'd like to hear what everyone else
thinks.

-Mark

[geemus (Wesley Beary)]

I think participating would be fun (I'm also interested in open data stuff).

[Josh Cramer]

Hey all:

I think this is a great opportunity to participate in the larger Iowa hacker community.

One idea to consider would be to kick things off at Vault and then let Iowa City folks congregate at Busy, while CR folks congregate at Vault over the weekend.

Demos could then happen back at Vault.

Great to see this community growing. Let me know if we can help further in any way. Really.

Josh Cramer

[Riley Eynon-Lynch]

I'm excited about the larger hackathon, and open data opportunities - the Vault seems perfect to me!  I'd be happy enough to stay in CR for the whole weekend.  Either way I hope we can get a large group together :D

Riley

[Howard Butler]

I also plan to participate (preferably IC, but I can trek up to CR too), and I have some interesting public-yet-obscure agriculture-oriented geographic data for Iowa that needs more visibility. I have lots of background with open source geographic software like MapServer and GDAL, and I would be excited to help cook stuff from a mapping angle.

Howard

[Mark Scully]

I'm excited by the possibilities and the interest everyone is expressing.  However, I've been talking this over with the other organizers and the current consensus is that pulling off a full hackathon by the 27th is a little rushed.  That said, I think this is a good thing for us to be involved in, and from the feedback I've gotten you do too.  So instead we're planning on theming the HackerSpaceICR meetup on April 28th to be a pre-event for the Open Iowa hackathon (which will occur sometime in the next few months).  Basically it'll be the same as our other events, show up and work on whatever, with the exception that a number of us will be working on finding data, cleaning it up, identifying people to collaborate with, selecting / creating a place to host the data, creating infrastructure for the actual event, going over what worked at Hack Omaha, etc.

We may have a company donating space, food, and wireless for us to use, so until we hear back on that the location isn't final, although it'll likely be in CR.  Hours are determined by space as well, so nothing official there yet.  I hope to have more for everyone soon.

-Mark

[David W.]

We may be able to host out of FuzzLabs in Coralville, if the location in CR doesn't work out.  I can talk to Tony at ComputerSource, if you like.

(My project is a gardening program called 'Verte' that pulls plant information from the USDA site.  It's gonna be awesome!)