News Local

Open Data Day event hopes to marry ideas with know-how 0

Kate Dubinski

By Kate Dubinski, The London Free Press

The online reporting system launched on Monday. (SUBMITTED)

The online reporting system launched on Monday. (SUBMITTED)

Londoners will be joining hackers around the world Saturday in an international day celebrating open data.

Two events will take place in London as part of the day that celebrates government transparency and hacking — using available data to create useful and innovative tools for others.

Members of the Citizen Corps — and anyone who joins them — will create a Wikipedia page in anticipation of the 2014 municipal elections.

“I came across Hamilton’s Wikipedia page and I thought we could do that — list the wards, possible candidates, important dates, possible issues,” said Jason Fredin, who came up with the idea.

“There’s an open invitation to everyone, but even if people don’t come out, they can participate in the page afterward because it’s Wikipedia. We may lay the groundwork, but people can edit it at any time.”

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia online that can be edited by anyone. Edits must include source materials such as news articles, laws or other citations.

“Eventually the page will branch out to candidates’ websites, news coverage of the election, that kind of thing,” Fredin said.

“It’ll be a one-stop for who’s running in each ward, who’s running for mayor, what the issues are. Wikipedia is a starting point.”

Also in London, the unlab — a hacker space in the Convergence Centre — will bring together those with app and website ideas with programmers and developers.

“We want a lot of people to come out, anyone with an idea,” said Kelly McGregor, who’s organizing London’s open data day.

“It’s a way for public information to be used to design something. We’re going to look at data sets from London but also from the provincial and federal levels.”

The City of London maintains a data catalogue, mainly with parks and recreation data.

The unlab team also will write a script to convert somewhat difficult-to-decipher city data into an easy-to-manipulate formula.

“My biggest focus will be what data services are coming out of other cities and how we can adapt them for London,” said McGregor.

The International Open Data Hackathon lets people write applications, analyze and create maps, charts and other visualizations of publicly available data.

Kate.dubinski@sunmedia.ca

Twitter.com/KateatLFPress

--- --- ---

London Open Data Hackathon events

  • Wikipedia mini-hackathon

When: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Where: 402.5 Richmond St.

  • Open data day 2013

When: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Where: Unlab, Convergence Centre, 99 Collip Circle

 

Reader's comments »

By adding a comment on the site, you accept our terms and conditions and our netiquette rules.

Featured Businesses

Go to the Marketplace »
http://www.lfpress.com/2013/02/22/open-data-day-event-hopes-to-marry-ideas-with-know-how
www.lfpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
43462
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UZ6OV5OLZHHLJJNNEDCBLR6FJ7MWTNNB
<urn:uuid:97c709c3-3f88-4ac4-8ec3-b6bca23925d3>
2013-05-25T15:41:48Z
216.113.74.57
sha1:YZSIVQSLZPSPITE64FY577FXDYA55LQT
<urn:uuid:b27eb384-6768-4fdc-8c66-5a0643f4cb1f>
http://www.lfpress.com/2013/02/22/open-data-day-event-hopes-to-marry-ideas-with-know-how
response
<urn:uuid:bb234e95-c866-4fd4-bc36-f1a2cbc06d19>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf