Municipal Finance Hackfest - Planning thread

[Joey Coleman]

We'll be having our first hackfest next Monday, the 28th, at Think|
haus. We'll start at 6pm.
Think|haus is located at 25 Dundurn St N in Hamilton.

Goal:

To make the election financial disclosure data available to everyone
in a machine readable open format to advance public understanding of
municipal campaign financing.

Process:

Take PDFs of the election finance disclosure forms which will be
uploaded by the City of Hamilton on Monday.
Run a script to convert the PDFs into text and data.
Conduct a manual check of the text and data to ensure accuracy.
Organize the text into a dataset
Upload the dataset to OGDI and Raise The Hammer's elections data
store.

Resources/People required:

Think|haus can comfortably house 20 people working on the project with
room for about 5 visitors coming in and out of the hackerspace during
the project. (The visitors allows for people curious to see how open
data movements operate to learn about the process)

The suggested breakdown of the 20 people is as follows:

4 people from Think|haus (Richard Degeleer and Joey Coleman included
in this number)
2 people from CATCH (They've previously scanned and posted financial
disclosures on their website. They also understand the disclosures
better than any other organization locally)
2 people from The Spectator (Bill Dunphy who is their open data editor
and someone from their art department)
1 person from Hamilton Community News.
1 person to coordinate uploading and organizing the final dataset
3 web developers to work on a page on OpenHamilton.ca for the public
to have an interface to search the data without having programming
knowledge themselves.
7 hackers to convert the PDFs to data

This will be an enjoyable evening of socializing along side creating
the dataset.

In terms of food and drink, Think|haus has a canteen with pop, juices,
tea, coffee and a freezer with mini-pizzas, pizza pockets, and ice
cream bars at reasonable prices. Of course, you can bring your own
drinks/food and store in the fridge.

If people wish to pass the hat, we can definitely order in or purchase
a veggie tray in advance.

[Joey Coleman]

WIFI access:

Think|haus can create a wifi access for this hackfest that will give
us more access than their guest access. They run a great firewall
here.

Nik and Ryan,

What access to you need to upload data to OGDI and RTH? Right now, the
guest wifi allows access on Port 80 and 443 for Internet access only
(HTTPS).
You'll likely need SSH or FTP.

Is there any other ports or protocols that people can think of that
we'll need on Monday?

- Joey

[NikGarkusha]

For OGDI, it's just HTTP Atom/XML protocol that's needed to load the
data, I believe.
The Data Loader is a client-side wizard like tool that helps configure
an XML schema for the data map (i.e. CSV fields to Cloud data tables)
and then pushes it out to the cloud via HTTP

> > a veggie tray in advance.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[NikGarkusha]

Actually, it uses HTTPS by default, but could be reconfigured. So if
HTTPS is available, would be great

[NikGarkusha]

Just a thought, a Wiki may not be a bad idea to share links, files,
capture progress, etc. I thought it was a best practice for the London
Trash hackathon that we adopted for the OpenHalton/OpenGuelph
hackathon last Dec too. We used pbworks (free for non-commercial use).
Still has some good links to map tools, data tools, etc:
http://ohoghackathon.pbworks.com

[Matt Grande]

It sounds like you guys have some specific numbers/people down. Is
there still space for another dev?

[NikGarkusha]

Just shared some thoughts about my experience at OpenHamilton's first
hackfest:

3 Lessons from OpenHamilton Hackfest http://bit.ly/hamhf1

[Ryan McGreal]

On 11-03-30 08:32 PM, NikGarkusha wrote:
> 3 Lessons from OpenHamilton Hackfest http://bit.ly/hamhf1

Hi Nik,

I'd love to republish your essay on Raise the Hammer. Is that okay? I'll
include a link back to the original.

If so, can you please send me a short bio for your author page?

Thanks,
Ryan

[Joey Coleman]

Ryan, could you add a note that a follow-up hackfest will occur next
Wednesday, 6pm, Think|haus.

We should be close to launching WardRep and the Finance app - they'll
be another article coming from me for that.

- Joey

On Mar 30, 9:25 pm, Ryan McGreal <edi...@raisethehammer.org> wrote:
> On 11-03-30 08:32 PM, NikGarkusha wrote:
>

> > 3 Lessons from OpenHamilton Hackfesthttp://bit.ly/hamhf1

[NikG]

That would be great, Ryan. Heres my quick summary/bio - does this work?

Bio: Open Data & Open Source geek, technology evangelist & consultant. Founder OpenHalton.ca. Open Source Strategy Lead at Microsoft (Port25.ca)

[Ryan McGreal, Raise the Hammer]

On Wed, March 30, 2011 10:32 pm, NikG wrote:
> That would be great, Ryan.

Hi Nik,

Thank you! The article is posted here: http://raisethehammer.org/blog/2114

A couple of things:

1. If you want your email address included with your bio, let me know.

2. If you have an RTH user account, send it to me and I'll attach your
author bio to it. That way, you'll be able to update it any time you need.

Kind Regards,
Ryan