Manuel Aristarán on civic hacking and open government

Manuel Aristarán (https://twitter.com/manuelaristaran), a software developer, civic hacker, and crusader for open government, will talk about the civic hacking movement in Latin America and what it means for government transparency.

Aristarán is a visiting international fellow (http://knightlab.northwestern.edu/2014/03/24/kicking-off-a-new-international-fellowship-with-manuel-aristaran/) at Northwestern University Knight Lab and is well-known in the journalism technology world. He's worked on recommendation engines, logistics and provisioning systems, public data tools and satellite ground station software. In 2010, he independently developed GastoPublicoBahiense.org (http://gastopublicobahiense.org/), a tool to browse and visualize expenditure data published by the municipality of Bahía Blanca, Argentina, his hometown.

In 2013, as a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow, Aristarán developed Tabula (https://github.com/jazzido/tabula), an open-source tool for extracting structured information from PDF files, a system now used in major newsrooms worldwide.

All are welcome. Lunch will be provided.

Please RSVP with Mei-Ling Hopgood, mhopgood@northwestern.edu.