Friday, April 05, 2013

Longmont Hackathon and Open Datasets








Developers, Hackers and Designers Sign up here:  http://longmonthackathon.eventbrite.com/

Longmont's Civic Hackathon (http://longmonthackathon.com/) will be firing up next weekend, April, 12th, 13th and 14th at Skyline Highschool in Longmont, CO. and the city just put up more Open Data Sets and and API's that developers and dev teams can take advantage of.

Cities and their information sets are supposed to be open to their residents but, that doesn't always happen to the level it really should.

Hackathons help change that.  We've seen larger cities like New York, Denver, Chicago, Austin and Oakland put on civic hackathons for a few years now, and that's really helped to open these city data sets and turn the cites more into Open Data Platforms for it's residents and it's businesses.

What's exciting to me is when a smaller city like Longmont (Pop. approx 88K) takes the initiative and puts on a civic hackathon.  It's not as common to see and, for that reason alone, needs to be encouraged even more.

Colorado has a very cool initiative called Open Colorado (http://opencolorado.org/).  The guys over at GISuser blog thought so too when they wrote this up about Longmont's Hackathon:

In April an awesome community hackathon event is taking place in Longmont CO and being hosted at Skyline High School (Longmont Hackathon) – I love the idea of doing this at a school – the perfect community venue! The City is involved in the planning, they have an official Twitter account @hackLongmont and also a facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Longmonthackathon

We need developers and designers to make it happen though.  The more the merrier and it's going to be a excellent event mixed with local business, the high school computer teams, the city technical folks, and many others.

The Longmont Gigabit Network is even making an appearance (there's a fiber connection with 1000MB up and down data speeds running into Skyline High School, where the Hackathon is taking place).  For those that didn't know: Longmont is building out it's own Municipal Fiber Network for it's residents and citizens (one of only a very few cities in America doing this).  If you live or work in Longmont, in the near future, you'll have access to some of the fastest and cheapest internet service on the planet.  Get a taste of it at this hackathon.

You don't have to be a professional developer; if you just dabble in writing code, we'd love to have you join us.  If you design things, join us and take a shot at figuring out the layout of a phone app, creating it's look and feel and work with some developers to make a prototype of it real.  The idea is to engage the community and come up with great ideas that can make our city (or any other city, it's all OpenSource) a better place to live.  All are welcome.

Sign up today:  http://longmonthackathon.eventbrite.com/


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