Fwd: Open Government Hackathon in Chicago 3/29-3/31

[Dietrich Ayala]

forwarding an event that might be of interest to folks on both of these lists.

anyone planning on going to this, or are in the chicagoland area and
want to meet up during that time?

-d


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Turk <james....@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 10:08 AM
Subject: Open Government Hackathon in Chicago 3/29-3/31
To: sunlig...@googlegroups.com


Sunlight Labs is proud to be coordinating our first ever Open
Government hackathon in a little over a month from March 29th to March
31st in Chicago.

Who Should Attend?

Anyone that is interested in contributing to an open source project
that will free or otherwise enhance government data can gather to
brainstorm and hack on things. Although the sprint takes place at
PyCon you don't have to be attending the conference (or even be a
Python developer) to attend. Participation is free and open to anyone.

What Happens at the Open Government Hackathon?

The nature of the sprint will be fairly freeform, two Sunlight Labs
members will be on hand guiding users that want to contribute to
opening up the government. Users can come to the sprint without any
background and we would help coordinate them and place them on a
project where there skills would be useful (there is always a ton of
scraping that needs to be done, building mini-web apps to showcase
gov't data, etc.)

Most likely we'll spend the first session on Sunday talking about some
project ideas and then interested parties will break off into groups
to work on their projects. Sunlight Labs developers will be available
in person and online to provide guidance and share expertise.

For ideas see the Big Issues and Project Ideas sections of the
Sunlight Labs Wiki (and feel free to contribute your own)

Also, the Apps for America deadline is on March 31st, so it isn't too
late to work on that last minute contest entry and win anywhere from
$100 to $15,000 dollars.

I'm Sold, When/Where Is It?

There will be an introductory session at 4pm on Sunday March 29th
where we'll get oriented and start working on some ideas. The sprint
itself will take place March 30th and 31st (with potential to go
longer depending on turnout/interest).

The sprint will be taking place at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare
hotel but there will also be an online presence if you are unable to
attend but would still like to participate.

If you are interested in attending please either reply to James
(jt...@sunlightfoundation.com) or add your name to the wiki page @
PyCon: http://us.pycon.org/2009/sprints/projects/opengov/

-James