You. Me. Musicians.
Indie Videogame Developers.
Librarians. User Experience and Interaction Designers.
Federal public servants and Ottawa City Data Stewards.
Mothers with strollers. Dads with beards.
It’s going to be weird, fun, and awesome.
December 3rd, Ottawa City Hall from 1:00pm EST to 4:00pm EST (ish)
Sign UpHere’s the deal:
Public data is becoming more accessible online. We’re talking about resto food & health inspection reports, 311 call summaries, bus schedules, building locations, zoning plans, dog park locations, and maps of free city parking.
Typically boring by itself, this data can be remixed with other sources and services to turn into web sites, interactive maps, or tomorrow’s hottest newspaper story. This stuff can end up changing lives.
On December 3rd, we’re going to hack on a problem that we all deal with every single day:
Being better neighbours.
Truth: the higher the population density, the less neighbours know about each other, interact, or take advantage of physical proximity to help each other.
Weird. Interesting!
How can public, openly available data help? What do you think about these ideas?
- Facebook plugins for dogparks & daycares via pulling their locations from http://ottawa.ca/opendata
- Impromptu supper clubs of neighbours whom have never spoken to each other that investigate local eateries, vernisages/gallery openings together. Discover new restos and galleries by looking at health inspection reports for addresses and the city’s online arts & events news streams.
- Perpetual block parties that collaborate to alert the city about potholes and fallen trees via 311 data feeds. Bonus: plant new trees using the city’s own grants for small-scale greenspacing.
- Apartment-building-wide skill-libraries! Instead of books, you check out people with skills and the catalog is posted online as open data itself.
- All of these crazy ideas are actually pretty easy to implement from a technical perspective, but the human design side of them might not be so straightforward. There are better, simpler ideas out there that could change your life in interesting little and big ways. That’s where you come in. Join us December 3rd at Ottawa City Hall and help dream, design, and build cool stuff that makes life better with open data.
(This event’s ticket price is $0. Coffee & snacks to fuel creative fires will be provided.)
Bonus Round!
Wow, you read all the way down here? Impressive.
If the above isn’t enough to entice you, did we mention that this event is INTERNATIONAL? Last year we had 76 cities run the event with us around the world. It was pretty cool. We’re doing it again this year and would love to see you reach out to them / rub it in that we’re better.
