Hands on with PTV's timetable data! (Open hack session)

Public Transport Victoria have finally released their timetable data in GTFS format: https://www.data.vic.gov.au/data/dataset/ptv-timetable-and-geographic-information-2015-gtfs

It could be weeks or months before Google actually integrates the data into their Google Maps platform, but there are lots of open source tools out there already that support GTFS. Let's dive in, understand what it means, and see if we can start an interesting project using the data.

Don't care about public transport data? You're welcome to come along and hack on any other open projects, or just bond with the open community as usual.

About open hack nights

The weekly Open Knowledge working bee is for anyone with any skill set to get together and work on Open Data projects, to talk about Open Knowledge, work on Open Knowledge projects, learn about new and old technologies, and discuss the nature of the new world of big, and often less than private, data and what can be done to use it for positive outcomes.

In part this is to overcome the reality that working on open data is more than a weekend hackathon, as much as we love them and attend them as participant, volunteers and organisers, and to help the projects that come from those hackathons continue to grow.

The format is still being settled - IT will be a combination of presentations, teach-ins, working bees and often all three on a given night.

Some projects have been flagged as potentially in need of some TLC:

• any and all mapping projects: Open Street Maps (the Wikipedia of maps! how to use, how to edit), HipsterMap, local maps like Can I Boat Here, bike maps, Accessible Melbourne (a disability access map), the municiple tree map of Victoria. There's even talk of some Minecraft mapping projects.

• Various wikis and knowledge repositories: Wikipedia, the Melbourne LocalWiki, Growstuff

• back end support and code sprints: Growstuff, and of the projects from GovHack or HealthHack that inspire you - Python, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, servers, bash scripting

• A meta analysis of the data being opened by are three levels of government - the City of Melbourne, the State of Victoria or the federal government. One goal is to hopefully discuss data format standards across various bodies - municiple councils often release the same data in different ways - and to encourage those organisations to get behind a single data format per data set.

• Data privacy and protection: what it is, what the Government is doing, what the law says, etc.

• Helping to organise the bigger hackathons, with a focus on inclusivity - venues and support for parents, people with disabilities, healthy food and drink alternatives, etc.

• Anything Open Knowledge you feel like working on that we've not listed

Some weeks will have more action than others - speakers, experts, a particular focus. We will update that week's event as it happens.

If you have something in particular you would like to learn (data privacy for instance), let us know and we'll work something out.