Government 2.0 got to the Northwest long before our Code for America team arrived in February.
Bill Schrier, chief technology officer for the City of Seattle, speaks at Seattle's datacamp at the Socrata offices. Photo by Chris Metcalf.
Last year at Seattle’s City Hall, hundreds attended Open Gov West, a conference to network open government enthusiasts and to foster progress on open government issues and technology in the region. The event subsequently inspired 10 Open Gov West meetups across the Western US and Canada, an Open Gov conference in British Columbia, and a series of mini conferences focused on information standards and collaborative open government projects.
Since 2009, the Seattle Department of Information Technology has published 101 public data sets in machine-readable formats from the location of bicycle racks to real time 911 fire calls. That’s a number that most cities don’t come close to reaching, and yet, when I turned to Bruce Blood, manager of the citywide web team, to congratulate him on his department’s work, he frowned and shook his head. “It’s not enough,” he said – the city could be more open.
Because of this existing Gov 2.0 movement, when our Code for America team held a data camp this President’s Day Weekend in Seattle, we didn’t really need to explain ourselves too much. The challenge for our team was really about wrangling 60 people on a rare blue-bird holiday weekend in a typically dark and wet part of the world in the middle of winter – its darkest and wettest of seasons – and get them excited bout working indoors on their laptops.
Seattle data camp attendees organize their learnings and skills into themes. Photo by Chris Metcalf.
Our first task was to find a space and invite a hearty mix of interested technologists, the city staff, communities, bloggers, journalists — and we were lucky to have some help along the way. The mayor’s office sent out a Tweet and a blog post on our behalf, and Socrata, the company that helps the city manage its public data, donated their office space downtown in Pioneer Square.
In spite of the good weather, our guests showed up early and stayed late, including Bill Schrier, chief technology officer for Seattle, who offered some opening words of encouragement, asking the group to help the city do more – to “turn data into information.”
Developers behind HearNear built a Seattle smartphone application on the citywide event calendar. Photo by Amber Case.
Though we were confident that if we built connections with the existing Gov 2.0 network in the area good things could happen, the data camp exceeded our expectations. By the power of every one’s willingness to collaborate at all levels — from Seattle’s Department of Information Technology staff to developers who drove from Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, to Antonia Koenig, a local news blogger and South Park neighborhood resident — attendees managed to accomplish a staggering number of projects by 5 p.m.:
- Fuzzy Neighborhoods: an interactive game called “Neighborhood Wars” that allows residents to map contested neighborhood boundaries.
- Hear Near: a new iPhone app, completed in four hours with a team of nine people. Built on the Geoloqi service and a parsed iCal feed of the City of Seattle events calendar to send text messages of event notices when an event is about to happen near you.
- Open Legistlation Strategy Session: Sarah Schacht of Knowledge as Power led a strategy session to open more legislative data in a machine-readable format for the City of Seattle.
- Pimp My Blog: An aspiring hyper-local blogger from an under-reported neighborhood (South Park) was at the DataCamp. The project team worked to add a map of community resources, which anyone can add to, and added a new calendar of community events – a widget developed on the citywide calendar powered by Trumba. The calendar widget was filtered to the neighborhood, and will also be available for another Seattle neighborhood news site, the Ravenna Blog.
- MADpub: When a disaster happens, the process to submit a report that your house has burned down is long and complicated. MADpub makes it easier. The project team – including some developers around the country coding remotely, in their pajamas – worked to refine the code base that resulted in 300 commits in one afternoon.
- Seattle API: Inspired by the pdxAPI (portland API) the team created a ilterable map of Seattle community resources (couchDB.)
For more about the camp, read this article by Alex Howard (@digiphile), Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media and this post by data camp attendee Joe McCarthy. Visit our Flickr stream for more photos from the event.
