The Great American Hackathon - Phoenix edition @ Gangplank

[Marc Chung]

Calling all Phoenix Rubyists interested in open government, government
transparency, and the reuse of government data: let's get together for
the Great American Hackathon.

This Saturday (12/12/2009), Gangplank HQ will be hosting the Phoenix
edition of the Great American Hackathon.

You can learn more about the national effort here:
http://www.sunlightlabs.com/hackathon09/

New to the open government scene? Don't worry, you'll be able to meet
like minded hackers and have time to talk and collaborate on
interesting open government projects, so participating is easy.

1. Show up with your laptop this Saturday at 10 AM

2. Brainstorm ideas with fellow hackers.

Need an idea?

* Make a public data set accessible in a developer friendly format.
http://github.com/sunlightlabs/fiftystates

For a list of public APIs and datasets, check these out:
* http://services.sunlightlabs.com/api/
* http://www.opensecrets.org/action/apis.php
* http://www.followthemoney.org/services/
* http://www.capitolwords.org/api/
* http://sunlightlabs.com/projects/CIVX/

* Ruby Developers
http://github.com/sunlightlabs/ruby-sunlightapi

3. Hack and contribute your work back to the public by making it
available on GitHub.com or code.google.com

Event details:

Where: The Gangplank co-working space, http://gangplankhq.com/when-and-where/
Address: 325 East Elliot Rd Suite 34, Chandler, AZ 85225
When: 10 AM to 5 PM. Stop by anytime.
Please RSVP: http://sunlightlabs.com/events/49/

The event is open to all. I look forward to seeing you there.

- Marc

[MilesTogoe]

is this the right event / forum  to work on projects for open sourcing govt run traffic engineering and Transportation Research Board activities ?   Like running our traffic signals on Ruby! - it can only improve.    If so, count me in!

[Kit Plummer]

Same same in Tucson: http://www.sunlightlabs.com/events/48/

Thanks for all these links Marc.

Kit

[Marc Chung]

John (MilesTogoe)

It's aimed at developers who want to mash up, build apps, datamine,
and visualize open datasets provided by various government
organizations. Still, you should stop by.

[Marc Chung]

Hey everyone,

Here's a great wrap-up of the Great American Hackathon:

http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/great-american-hackathon-wrap-/

That weekend in Phoenix, 5 developers gathered at Gangplank. After a
short period of discussion, we agreed to contribute our time on
building a parser for the Arizona State Legislature located at
http://azleg.gov. This work was done as part of the fiftystates
project [1] which supports organizations like MapLight [2] and
OpenCongress [3] in an effort to shed more light on how State
Governments work.

Our progress was noticed: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/hotness-arizona/

I'd like to thank Gangplank for hosting us, the developers who
attended, and everyone else for spreading the word. The event was
successful because of you.

- Marc

[1] http://fiftystates-dev.sunlightlabs.com/

[2] http://maplight.org/

[3] http://opencongress.org/