How Can We Use the City of Houston's Open Data to Do More Good?

The City of Houston has a big heap of data and they want your ideas on how to use it!

May 17th-19th, the City of Houston will Kick-Off the Open Data Initiative with a weekend long Houston Hackathon.

Who:

Our Guest Speaker will be Bruce Haupt (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/bruce-haupt/4/853/758) from the City of Houston’s Finance Department.

Bruce is with the citywide Performance Improvement Division, which leads the City of Houston's open data and open innovation programs.

Why:

Your ideas on how to use these data sets can dramatically improve our community by providing us with more accurate, real time data about our city's resources and how they're utilized.

Visit http://houstonhackathon.com (http://houstonhackathon.com/) to check out suggested projects that are closely aligned to Mayor Annise Parker’s Priorities, and represent noticeable pain points for the City.

Examples of projects listed (http://houstonhackathon.com/sample.html) include:

* creating a city dashboard of operational and/or financial performance

* mapping all of the city's Urban Gardens, Recycling Locations, or Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

* developing a Houston Bike app to show all things bike related in Houston

Those are just a few ideas the Mayor's office has developed, and we're going to spend time brainstorming how these projects and open City data sets can help advance civic-minded causes in Houston.

What:

Bruce will share the vision of Mayor Annise Parker and Council Member Ed Gonzalez for utilizing Houston's Open Data Initiative ( http://data.codeforhouston.com/ ) to improve our city. Then, he'll show you some examples of how initiatives like this have benefitted other cites, and tell you about some of his favorite projects.

You'll learn about the available public city data sets the city wants to put in the hands of citizen data scientists, software developers, and general do-gooders.

You'll have a chance to share your thoughts as we brainstorm together to come up with projects to make our city and the world a better place through technology.

Importantly, this will be a discussion versus a lecture.

Join Us Tuesday, May 14th and Bring a Friend!