Hey everyone! So, this Saturday, March 4, was Open Data Day. For those of you who are unaware, “Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. For the seventh time in history, groups from around the world will create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. It is an opportunity to show the benefits of open data and encourage the adoption of open data policies in government, business and civil society” (source). This was my second time attending an Open Data Day contest (I attended one sponsored by IBM last year, more information here) and this one was sponsored by the NS government and Dalhousie’s (my university) School of Information Management and was just over 24 hours alone.

For this event I decided to invite my younger sister, Megan, along. She can’t code (yet) but she was great company and did an excellent job cleaning up the dataset we chose to use for Select Local.

Select Local

Select Local connects the user with stores and farms that are certified by Select Nova Scotia. “Select Nova Scotia is a program developed by the Province of Nova Scotia to encourage Nova Scotians to shop and buy locally. Select Nova Scotia promotions and campaigns raise consumer awareness about Nova Scotia food, food products and seafood, locally made goods and locally owned and operated businesses.Select Nova Scotia recognizes that when you buy local, more money stays in the local economy, supporting good jobs; strengthening local businesses; and supporting local communities” (source). Basically, you enter in either “Current Location” or a specific address and the map is populated with pins representing that location of Select Nova Scotia stores as well as the table below will be filled with information regarding the  Select Nova Scotia stores within 10km of the address entered. You can then click on one of the stores in the table and an alert will open with more information regarding the store. Clicking on the call button will call the store, directions will get directions between the address entered and the store, and website opens the website of the store, assuming they’re provided, which not all of them provided. 

Positives

I’m really, really happy with how the visual design of select local ended up, especially considering the majority of the UI was done between 12-3am. Another positive was since my partner is not only my sister but also my roommate we could leave the site and go back to our apartment (this means I could hang out in my pajamas, very important). Megan was a positive too, girl did a great job at cleaning up some iffy data.

Negatives

Xamarin, I love you, you’re great, but man are you buggy sometimes. For many hours Saturday night I had a button I couldn’t see in Visual Studio but definitely existed in the build. Also, geolocator (which I had to use because putting pins on the map required lat/long but I only had addresses) had a bad habit of freaking out and locking the app if you tried to use it more than about 50 times. Which kinda sucked when you needed it to be ran over 500 times. Yeah. I figured out, eventually, it was a memory issue but unfortunately was not able to solve this issue during the hack (or now for that matter). Yay tech probs.

Conclusion

I haven’t been to a hackathon in quite a while, this was actually my first of the year. Working full time makes finding free time to attend things like hackathons a bit difficult, especially since most start before I get off on Fridays (or right after). However, I’m very glad I was able to attend this one (with Megan) and I was reminded, once again, how much I love development when I pushed my “I’m going to bed” time from 2:30 am, to 3:30 am, to 4:00 am, to 4:30 am...

Anyway ladies and gents, I will talk to you all later. I’ve applied to some hacks at the end of April (which hopefully I’ll be able to attend, c’mon HackCU I really want to go to Colorado) and ToD is nearing completion so there will probably be another blog about that soon. In addition, I’m planning on releasing a series of blogs on prepping/attending hackathons for newbies so look forward to that.

Super pumped for her first hack!

Or maybe not (note: this is 3:30 am)

"Hard at work”

3 Screens > 2 Screens

Tomorrow we’re celebrating the Open Data Day with a hacking afternoon and a Cafe Scientifique later in the evening! We’ll have two guests talking about opening up the scientific research data:

Michael Crusoe - one of the founders of the Common Workflow Language project (http://www.commonwl.org/).

The CWL project supports repeatability of science / open data by enabling scientists to completely describe their data analysis workflows using an open and free standard. Even though v1.0 was released just this last July, CWL is already being used in the cancer genomics cloud pilots in the USA, in the digital humanities, and in radio astronomy. We are also assisting the FDA sponsored BioComput Object efforts where we hope to assist with their regulatory needs.

Vida Mildažienė - Professor at VMU Dept. of Biochemistry and Biotechnologies in the Faculty of Natural Sciences (Kaunas, Lithuania). will talk about the role of open science in communicating science to the general public, enhancing science education opportunities in Lithuania, and present example projects of what's cooking in Lithuania right now.

WHAT HAPPENED DURING OPEN DATA DAY 2016 IN AIX EN PROVENCE?

This blog post was written by Samuel Goeta and the team in Open Knowledge France

This year, Open Data Day in France left Paris after hosting us in several tech hubs in the capital: Telecom ParisTech in 2013, Simplon in 2014 and La Paillasse en 2015. However, Paris still celebrated Open Data Day online. Etalab, the French government open data taskforce, made a blog post celebrating their favorite open data apps and Open Street Maps announced that there are now 400 million objects in its French database.

On the 5th of March, Open Knowledge France headed South to the city of Aix en Provence, near Marseille. Yelloworking hosted the Open Data Day, and it was the first event organized at the new villa of the coworking space. Thanks to Open Knowledge’s Open Data Day mini grant, we were able to start the event with delicious Italian buffet that gave us plenty of energy for hacking. Anonymal, a local webtv, shoot a short video report (in French) on the event. In two minutes, it explains the concept of the open data day and shows some of the activities that happened on March 5th in Aix en Provence.

Our main activities

Activity #1: Hack a coffee machine

The concept:

Open the guts of the coffee machine of the coworking space (ask premission first!)

Connect an Arduino board to the buttons of the machine

Collect data on each coffee made: time, length and strength of the coffee.

This data will be used to monitor the activity of the coworking space as each member or visitor usually consumes a coffee.

Why it matters: Open Knowledge can seriously benefit from open hardware devices for automatic real-time data collection. This activity was one of the rare bridge between the open hardware and open data movements which rarely speak to each other.

How did it turn out? Well, the Arduino starter kit is indeed…a good start. We managed to connect the buttons, monitor the strength of a coffee, to record on a log when each coffee is being made. The code has already been published but we still need more equipment to actually publish data.

What’s next: Another hacknight is planned, and the data will be visualised live on Yelloworking website.

Activity #2: Open Yelloworking data

The concept: Yelloworking is a transparent coworking space which already provides regular updates on its incomes, expenses and its activities. We used Open Data Day to push transparency one step further by opening data on Yelloworking’s revenues and visualizing it.  

Why it matters: Open Business models are promising to develop transparent business and increase consumer trust. This is especially true for coworking spaces which are about strengthening trust and tightening ties between members. Open data on revenues can be a powerful way to renew transparency in the corporate sector.

How did it turn out? Samuel, as both the host of the event and a partner at Yelloworking, went through every single invoice and reported it in a CSV file. Then, he visualized the data using Raw, an incredible tool made by Density Design. Data has been published on NosDonnees.fr, a CKAN instance run by Open Knowledge France and Regards Citoyens.

What’s next: Yelloworking now wants to open data on its operating expenses. However, the work to report this information will take much longer.  

Activity #3: Deliberations of the city council

The concept: The city council of Aix en Provence, as everywhere in France, votes on deliberations (public debates by city officials). These protocols are online, and can be downloaded as a PDF, but for the average citizen, inspecting and understanding the official lingo in these files is a fastidious job. PourAix, a young collective dedicated to mobilisation and citizens participation, had an excellent idea to map these complicated documents to make local policymaking more accessible. For each protocol, they identified the place that are affected by the decision and created a map. The participants crowdsourced this information and reported the precise place concerned by each deliberation in a file in order to create a map including date, location, name of the elected official proposing the bill, full text of the document, decisions taken.

Why it matters not only here: We know that much extremely valuable information about local life is still stuck in PDF. Crowdsourcing can, in a matter of hours, make these information much more accessible and processable. This in the end, can help and foster accountability.

How did it turn out? More than 100 deliberations were mapped. Crowdsourcing helped PourAix to map all 2015 deliberations. The data were published on their data portaldata.pouraix.fr, on data.gouv.fr and mapped using Umap, OSM France ’s tool.

What’s next:  These crowdsourced data will be used to create a monitoring tool for citizens on the model of NosDeputes.fr, the Parliament Monitoring Tool made by Regards Citoyens.

Para este Día de los Datos Abiertos, en Ciudadano Inteligente nos propusimos llevar el concepto de apertura a la ciudadanía. En un país profundamente centralizado como lo es Chile, decidimos que no bastaba con realizar actividades en nuestra capital Santiago, debíamos ir un paso más allá.

Es así como surgió la idea de llevar el Open Data Day a Villarrica, una ciudad ubicada al sur de Chile que cuenta con un entorno natural privilegiado, lo que ha fomentado el establecimiento de una economía fuertemente ligada al turismo en la zona. Teniendo en cuenta esto llegamos con una pregunta ¿Cómo los datos abiertos pueden contribuir al turismo?

Para abrir la conversación realizamos una presentación sobre datos abiertos en la que presentamos iniciativas realizadas con datos abiertos y analizamos la información sobre turismo contenida en el portal de datos abiertos del gobierno. A partir de esto conversamos sobre cómo a través del análisis de estos datos se pueden planificar de mejor manera las actividades turísticas y así llegar mejor a los diferentes públicos.

A lo largo de la conversación con la sociedad civil, surgieron preguntas sobre qué tan efectivo son los datos abiertos en estos momentos y sobre cómo los datos abiertos modificarán la sociedad que hoy conocemos, para bien o mal.

Ieri in occasione dell'International Open Data Day ci si è trovati a Bologna per parlare di open data. E' stato un incontro interessante e ricco di spunti, dal quale mi sembra ci si sia congedati con molta conoscenza in più. Un accrescimento di conoscenza che è una diretta conseguenza, come faceva notare l'organizzatore Andrea Nelson Mauro, della varietà di figure che ruotano intorno al fenomeno dei dati aperti. In attesa che gli open data possano divenire veramente una infrastruttura di innovazione economica e sociale essi già costituiscono un mezzo di contaminazione di competenze e conoscenze. All'incontro di ieri c'erano civil servants che parlavano di ontologie, informatici che si interrogavano sul diritto amministrativo, giuristi che approcciavano database, giornalisti alle prese con dataset, attivisti civici e sociali che mostrvano geodati. Ecco allora una breve sintesi,seguendo il programma della giornata, dello scambio di conoscenza che abbiamo potuto mettere in pratica ieri. Open Data: Benvenuti in Romagna  In apertura ho presentato una fotografia della diffusione degli open data in Romagna partendo dal 'censimento' delle iniziative delle singole amministrazioni comunali romagnole e facendone una mappa , che spero a breve si potrà ulteriormente colorare di verde ma aumentano anche la qualità di quanto già fatto :

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