Change we can believe in

The first edition of the EUhackathon took place on the 8th and 9th of November 2011 in Brussels.

This hack-a-thon brought together 54 participants from 17 different nationalities to work on two challenges around the theme of transparency on the Internet.

1. Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. Coders worked on updating this code as a means to provide consumers with greater knowledge about the quality and speed of their Internet connections.
2. Google's Transparency Report shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests to remove content from their services. Coders worked to improve this, by creating new and interesting visualizations.

EU Vice-President Neelie Kroes incharge of the Digital Agenda offered her support and congratulations at the Awards Ceremony.

The hackathon winners were:

For the Internet Quality Track measuring network speeds:

• First Prize: Team Ferioli (Federica Cau, Pasquale De Luna and Nicola Ferioli) – Italy - with Internet Performance Analysis
• Second Prize: Team Maggi (Federico Maggi, Roman Kochanek, Francesco Roveta, Alessandro Frossi, Alberto Volpato) – Italy
• Third Prize: Team Artimon (Alexandru Artimon, Ionut Dobre, Florin Barhala, Walter Schneider) – Romania

For the Global Transparency Track:

• First Prize: UN-Team (Sven Clement, Hauke Gierow, Stefan Wehrmeyer) – Luxembourg And Germany - with their game: ‘Beat the Censor‘
• Second Prize: Niels Rasmussen – Denmark
• Third Prize: Team Indigeni Digitali (Giuliano Iacobelli, Alessandro Manfredi, Claudio Squarcella, David Funaro, Matteo Collina) – Italy

(via Google Policy Blog and http://www.euhackathon.eu/)

Aleem Walji, practice manager for innovation at the World Bank Institute, which assists and advises policy makers and NGOs, tells the Guardian's Activate summit in London about the organisation's commitment to open data.

For more check data.worldbank.org

Many important government transparency programs may be cut by Congress.

To help the Sunlight Foundation prevent this, sign the petition at www.sunlightfoundation.com/savethedata

Last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom signed a first-of-its-kind open data law requiring San Francisco's City departments and agencies to post certain types of data sets to a publicly accessible portal at DataSF.org.

This cements progress made under an executive directive in 2009 and marks a significant expansion of San Francisco's Open Data policy.

Mayor Newsom said:

San Francisco once again demonstrates what it means to be on the cutting edge of government openness and transparency

By making data sets publicly available, we’re forging valuable public-private partnerships with app developers and making City services easier to access for our residents.

San Francisco’s open data policy builds on President Obama’s call for more open and transparent government. Newsom explained how this leadership, at the Executive level, is a guide for elected officials around the country:

President Obama’s leadership in pressing for easier access to government data should be a wake-up call to elected officials around the country. Open data is quickly becoming the gold standard of accountability and transparency that all citizens will come to demand..

I’m proud that here in San Francisco, we’re ahead of the curve on this important government 2.0 initiative.

Alex Howard interviewed Portland's mayor Sam Adams about the city's recent Civic Apps contest.

It's an interesting interview in which he explains the rational for the city's Open Data initiatives and the benefits it brings to residents of the city. Some quotes from the interview:

In Portland, like I think most cities, when people are armed with knowledge, they make wiser choices

For us, data has always been there, in some cases for decades. Putting it to use for the public and help people make money while they do it – we intend to be the open source capital of the nation – and this is one contribution we can make, with our data sets.

Some of the prize winning apps that make use of the City's data include:

• Cross-platform Group Messaging and Location Beaconing for Disaster Relief  - a resource for citizens, medical teams and governments before, during and after disasters.
• PDX Trees - Find trees with Heritage Tree status
• Portland Bike to Transit Map - web map that helps you figure out how to ride your bike to transit
• CivicApps Data Previewer - A web application to preview any of the public geo data on CivicApps from your web browser.
• Pdxtrian - Helps riders of Portland's excellent mass transit system, TriMet. 
• MyTriMet.com   - designed to answer one simple question. Where's my bus?
• PDX Bus - isplays arrival times for public transport in Portland, Oregon
• pdxhash - is a scheme for geotagging locations in the Portland area with a short string made up of numbers and letters
• PDXAPI.com - website providing a JSON api to nicely formatted, developer friendly versions of the datasets provided at CivicApps.org.
• Clackamas County Fire/EMS twitter feed - Sends the most recent fire/EMS call in Clackamas County to a Twitter account.

For more, check Alex's blog-post at Govfresh.com and CivicApps.org

At the Activate 2010 conference, organized by the Guardian, Nigel Shadbolt of data.gov.uk gave a talk on the latent power of government data and the drive to open it up . A video of that talk is now available on-line and contains interesting examples of the power of open data.

Short video about last month's World Bank idea jam. It brought together data gurus, software engineers and development specialists to discuss the opportunities to build applications on World Bank data.

For more on the World Bank's App contest, check Apps for Development.

Conrad Quilty-Harper recent article for Telegraph.co.uk explores how data is changing how we live. In it he provides 10 real-world examples in the fields of Shopping, Relationships, Business deliveries, Maps, Education, Politics, Society, War and Advertising.

While the article is focused primarily on the benefits of data mining for companies, it also gives examples that show fundamental shifts in our society. Some snippets below in relation to government's use of data:

Politics

Spending data for the government is being released on a much greater scale, with the release of COINS spending data to be supplemented by itemised spending above £500 from local government. Several bodies have appeared that aim to provide a clear picture of how the Government spends money, including Where Does My Money Go?, OpenlyLocal and Armchair Auditor...

The London Datastore and Data.gov.uk are campaigning for and highlighting open data releases from the Government, and the Government itself is planning a raft of data releases. With more data becoming available about how our Government operates, it'll inevitably be pressured to change.

Linked data and the future

The majority of the information that we use in our daily lives is "dumb", or unconnected. The next step is "linked data", or data that talks to each other. In the UK, Tim Berners-Lee and the team behind Data.gov.uk are aiming to create a linked database of Government information. By providing all data the Government produces in a linked format, individuals will be able to pull in different sets of data to produce new and innovative ways of understanding how our Government and the world works.