Civic Data Hackathon with NYPL Labs - RSVP on Eventbrite

We're partnering with NYPL Labs for a civic data hackathon! Join us to help make data more accessible! RSVP on Eventbrite: http://j.mp/1yNmIOw

Be sure to join the Eventbrite wait list (http://j.mp/1yNmIOw) if you can attend but slots have already filled. NYPL Labs will be keeping an eye on it.

People have talked about making civic data more accessible for a long time. If you can find data about the way your government and local organizations operate, you can shed light on interesting patterns and stories and better engage with your community. It’s all about transparency, accountability, and enabling change. It’s a beautiful concept. It’s wonderful for society.

In reality data is usually dirty and boring: If you're lucky, it's comes out as a bunch of numbers and rows and tables. In many cases it is even worse, and the information is locked into opaque formats like PDF. Either situation isn't very useful without a lot of laborious and technical prodding and exploration. Democracy deserves better!

The Civic Data Hackathon is about solving this problem. Together, participants will be:

• Working together to convert specific datasets to more open and usable formats.

• Creating new ways for people to ask questions and get answers from open datasets.

• Designing better interfaces to explore datasets.

• Contributing to reusable tools that enable normal, non-technical human beings to learn something from data.

The event will mark the public launch of two civic data tools: Tabula (http://tabula.technology/) and CivOmega (http://www.civomega.com/). Tabula is built to make data extraction for pdfs as simple as possible, and CivOmega makes it easy for technologists to convert a dataset into a civic "Mad Lib" that anybody can use to get answers.