Coding Meetup in Montreal, Nov. 29th

[Jennifer Bell]

In order to draw a bigger crowd of like minds, I've decided to co-host
the 'Scraping Saturday' mentioned previously on this list as part of
an Open Government Coding Meetup with Robin Millette of Civic Access.
The event will be this Saturday, Nov. 29th, at 1pm at Station C in
Montreal.

We'll be doing a speed-geek session showcasing several Montreal Open
Government projects, followed by a coding session, where I hope to
attract volunteers to help create scrapers for Travel and Hospitality
Expenses.

Event details are on Upcoming, here:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1384642/?ps=5

The Scraper-Maker described in the presentation here:
http://www.slideshare.net/jenniferbell/visiblegovernmentca-expense-visualizer-pilot-montreal-on-rails-presentation/

is still not available for download, as I have to test installation
and useability on some guinea pigs before giving it up for wide
release.

Jennifer

[Jennifer Bell]

A follow-up from the code meetup last Saturday:

We had 10 people attend the general project presentations at Station
C, where 3 open government projects were presented:

- the VisibleGovernment.ca expense scraper
- Robin Millette's waglo: http://cancan.waglo.com/dataface/
- Michael Lenczner's Our Parliament: http://ourparliament.ca/members

Followed by a general discussion of different projects in Canada and
elsewhere. About 5 people stayed after 2:30 to work on the ExpenseDB
scraping project. The scraper-maker turned out to be not very user
friendly for new users, and no one was able to submit a department
before 5. I received feedback that things would likely have gone
better if I'd walked people through scraping a department the first
time.

Two departments were submitted later however, and at least two
volunteers have said they will continue to work on the project.

The code is available for download here:
http://github.com/jenniferb/hospitality-and-travel-expense-scraper-maker/wikis/home
Issue tracking is here: http://code.google.com/p/expensescrapermaker/issues/list?thanks=1&ts=1228236318
Training videos are here:
http://github.com/jenniferb/hospitality-and-travel-expense-scraper-maker/wikis/example-videos

Jennifer

On Nov 24, 10:36 pm, Jennifer Bell <visiblegovernm...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> In order to draw a bigger crowd of like minds, I've decided to co-host
> the 'Scraping Saturday' mentioned previously on this list as part of
> an Open Government Coding Meetup with Robin Millette of Civic Access.
> The event will be this Saturday, Nov. 29th, at 1pm at Station C in
> Montreal.
>
> We'll be doing a speed-geek session showcasing several Montreal Open
> Government projects, followed by a coding session, where I hope to
> attract volunteers to help create scrapers for Travel and Hospitality
> Expenses.
>
> Event details are on Upcoming, here:http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1384642/?ps=5
>

> The Scraper-Maker described in the presentation here:http://www.slideshare.net/jenniferbell/visiblegovernmentca-expense-vi...