Launching Hamilton's Modified Change By Us

Participants gathered in the think|haus lounge to kickoff the event

Two weeks ago, Hamiltonians gathered at think|haus, our local makerspace, and built an alpha version of Change By Us for our city.

Bringing together developers, designers, city leaders, and citizens, the event was a unique partnership that showed local talent can achieve local solutions.

Since our meet-up, the Open Hamilton team has worked to get the project ready for final polish and launch.

Led by the efforts Alex Wagner and James Arlen, the source code of Change By Us has been modified and launched on the OH server.

Our citizen contributors have created a list of improvements and modifications to Change By Us that will enable our city to better measure feedback and suggestions as we all work to improve civic engagement.

On Thursday, we need to finalize local graphics and start the next phase of the project - Hamilton improvements that can be returned to the source code.

The Change By Us project is now in its third phrase of development and we are in a position to build Hamilton's reputation as a locale with a strong web development sector that international powerhouses should local in.

Join us Thursday at 7pm at think|haus, 25 Dundurn St North (Hamilton), for our launch hackfest.

Please RSVP on Eventbrite here: hamonthackfest.eventbrite.ca/

Event participant Dave Heidebrecht blogged about the event, read his take here.

Open Hamilton looking for waste collection .... developers and data experts

The City of Hamilton is considering giving Open Hamilton access to waste collection information (pick up days, collection changes etc) to see if there is interest among the development community in creating garbage collection apps.

Open Hamilton is looking for a local developer interested in meeting with the City and providing data specifications for the implementation of this data set.

This is a great opportunity to make a positive impact in our community and test our skills on a dataset that's useful to every resident in our city.

The 5 W's of hamilton.ca

It's time for Hamilton's official civic website to reflect what's great about our city and Open Hamilton wants you to be part of making this happen.

Join us at City Hall (yes, City Hall) next Thursday at 6 p.m. 

We're meeting to conceptualize the answer to the questions:

• What is the purpose of the City website? 
• What does a City website do, what does it not do?
• What is the role of the citizen in creating the City website?
• How is a City website designed? What is the framework for a City?
• Is it a product or a platform?
• and much much much more....

City staff will be present to observe the discussion.

This is our opportunity as an open data community to set the City in the right direction as they begin thinking about what a new hamilton.ca will look like.

There are no preconceptions, please bring your wildest ideas or not-so-wild ones.

6:00 p.m.
Thursday February 16, 2012
Hamilton City Hall (2nd floor)
71 Main Street West

We ask that you register for this event by visiting our Eventbrite page.

March #Hack4HamOnt now The Bay Hackathon and will be in Burlington

Open Hamilton is excited to join our friends at Open Halton to move the March #Hack4HamOnt to Burlington to take advantage of the opportunities to work in partnership with the City of Burlington to improve our communities.

The Bay Hackathon is tentatively scheduled for the same weekend as #Hack4HamOnt was - March 2nd to 4th.

The City of Burlington's Council formally adopted open data in December. The motion by Burlington's City Council formalized practice - Burlington started offering open data during the summer on their website.

Open Halton and us are meeting with Burlington city staff to plan the event. We hope to announce a location shortly.

Open Hamilton to meet with City Manager on Monday

Open Hamilton will meet with Hamilton's City Manager, Chris Murray, on Monday.

Chris Murray, the city's top civil servant, is the leading staff advocate for open data and we're glad to be meeting with him to offer our assistance in helping him with preparing the open data report to City Council.

Murray told The Hamilton Spectator last January: “We have to send a message to ourselves: it is not our (city staff’s) information to control. Sometimes you just have to let go. That isn’t always easy. The tech is relatively easy to apply, though some cases are more time-consuming and expensive than others.”

The meeting was arranged by Ward 1 Councillor Brian McHattie, the leading proponent of open data on Council and mover of the motion requesting a report about open data.

Four members of Open Hamilton will be at the meeting. There will be City Manager and one of his staff members with Councillor McHattie facilitating the meeting.

It is a one hour meeting and will focus on planning to move our city forward.

With this in mind, members of Open Hamilton met Thursday evening during Startup Drinks to discuss our goals for the meeting.

Our core goals in the meeting are:
We will focus upon the public consultation session and have a few questions for our fellow citizens to help guide us during Monday's meeting.

1. To have staff commit to timeline to present Open Data to city Council
2. Staff designates a liaison to streamline communications; rather than consuming resources from every individual department, and additional overhead from all sides.
3. If the staff report timeline is greater than two months away, we should hold a public consultation meeting.
4. Staff releases a letter that explains the city's stance on Open Data, as well as which levels of management are authorized to work with parties interested in open data.

What do you want from a public consultation?

Is there something you wish to see implemented in the spring that we should be focused on as part of the consultation?

Who do you wish to see at the consultation?

Let us know what you think, let's start the discussion.

Skate Hamilton is live!

As the temperature starts to dip below freezing and we start to see some snow many people also start thinking about where to play hockey and go skating in and around the city. We at OpenHamilton decided to help Hamilton area citizens with this problem this year by building a better experence to discover rinks than the city currently offers by building SkateHamilton. We've been working hard on this for about a month and recently demoed it at DemoCamp Hamilton and got great feedback. In total we 53 rinks listed at this moment including all the city owned/operated indoor and outdoor rinks. Each rink also has a listing of any public activities that take place at the rink.

We have also built a mobile optimized version of this site to provides a better experience to you when you are looking for rinks on the go. We are working hard on finishing the last few parts of Skate Hamilton including an embeddable version to put on your website. We are also planning on adding some social features so that you can let others know when you are planning to go skating or to help you organize a game of pick-up hockey. We welcome any feedback either via Twitter, @OpenHamilton, or via our email list.

Once again this application shows what developers and citizens can do when we're empowered with municipal data. Unfortunately, the City of Hamilton is not providing us with much open data and all the rink data in Skate Hamilton was collected manually. We urge citizens to contact their councillors and the mayor to let them know how important open data is to them and how it can help developers build useful apps for all citizens.

Developers

Skate Hamilton also has a rudimentary API that you can use to get access to the data inside our database. You can see all the API information at http://skatehamilton.herokuapp.com/api If you have any feature requests or further thoughts on how we should expand our api you can drop us a line on our Google Group.

#Hack4HamOnt - Open Hamilton to host Hamilton's first open data weekend!

Do you want to Hack for Humanity?

Let's be ambitious together, join us in bringing International Open Data Hackathon to Hamilton!

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Microsoft's Make Web Not War, we're going to hold Hamilton's first weekend hackathon during the first weekend of December complete with free food, entertainment, all-nighters (for those that like that sort of thing) , and fun.

We're calling this event #Hack4HamOnt and it will coincide with December's International Random Hacks of Kindness (we've applied to be a host site - we are not yet an RHoK site) and International Open Data Hackathon.

#Hack4HamOnt will:

• Build great apps for the citizens of the Greater Hamilton Area and join other cities as part of the international events to build apps for humanity


• Demonstrate the value of Open Data for the cities of Burlington and Hamilton


• Serve as a model of engagement and participation for other nearby cities


• Foster open local government that empowers citizens to meet our the needs of our communities by transparency in government information


• Bring Hamiltonians together with the shared purpose of improving our municipal government using our unique skill sets in a showcase of positive civic engagement


• Help brand Hamilton as an ambitious technologically aware city that is tackling the challenges of civic society by working in collaboration.


• Empower citizens to improve our municipal governments


• Give citizens the tools and information to better engage in civic society, life, and governance


• Show the Greater Hamilton Area is full of talented, creative people that love our city


• Allow everyone to use their skills for civic good


• Spark innovation by creating collaborative teams with individuals that may not otherwise meet


• Take back the word "hacking" to it's original meaning of constructing with a positive outcome

Where do I sign-up?

Visit our Eventbrite registration page

What's a Hackathon?

A hackathon brings people together to do great things with people they know and other they've just met.

Why the term "hack"?

The first meaning of "hack" described the modification of hardware to make it better, faster, add features or make it do something great that it originally wasn't intended to do. We're "hacking" the city to make it better by taking information and modifying it to better serve our community.

When and Where?

It all begins Thursday December 1st at 6:00pm and wraps up Sunday December 4th at 5:30pm. (Don't worry, you're allowed to go home and nap.)

We'll be holding the opening and closing events at The Hamilton Spectator auditorium at 44 Frid St. The work will be done at thinkhaus and the Staircase Theatre at 25-27 Dundurn St N.

The full draft schedule is available here.

The big events over the weekend is the opening night on Thursday December 1st at The Hamilton Spectator auditorium (6:00pm), the working kick-off (w/ free food) Friday evening at The Staircase Theatre (6:00pm), the free hot breakfasts at 7:30am on Saturday and Sunday, and finally the closing event on Sunday at 2:30pm back at The Hamilton Spectator auditorium.

Projects will be decided upon at the opening event and the groups will decide their times over the weekend.

What are we going to achieve?

There are numerous projects already underway for #Hack4HamOnt. The projects are listed here.

Our showcase for the weekend is "Adopt a Hydrant" which will allow citizens to adopt a Hydrant for snow clearing to assist our Fire Department to keep us safe this winter and assist them in knowing what Hydrants still need clearing.

How can I get involved?

Everyone can contribute their time and skills. You don't have to commit to the entire weekend, and you can choose to only be an observer. Pun intended: were Open to all! If you can only make it out for an hour, that's great. You can attend the opening and closing events only. It's up to you, you're in control. Here's a brief summary of how some of the types of people can join in.

Are you:

• An artist with only an hour of free time that weekend? Great, come out for an hour and contribute a graphic to a project.


• A developer looking to build something as part of a team learning new coding skills? We need computer cowboys and cowgirls like yourself to wrangle data into something useful. That means visualization, notification, integration, etc., all in the name of doing something crazy and fantastic. We also need you to eat all the food we'll have. (Seriously, some of us are concerned about eating too much in December.)


• A designer wanting to improve your web portfolio by giving to your community? We need people like you to make the everything look amazing, feel intuitive, and have a smooth user experience. The best application in the world that no one can use... isn't much use!


• Are you an information junkie? Can consume enough data? We need beautiful people like you to scour the local interwebs for interesting data, to help the rest of us figure out what's important.


• Aliens: You hovered over our East End trying to find a landing place in July and couldn't find any. We're sorry about that. Maybe you're interested in using the recreation app we're creating to find good landing sites. What size field do you require? Do you need a gas station nearby? Prefer soccer fields over baseball diamonds? Concerned about field flooding? The recreation app will include this information.
  
  There is a great landing field near our hackathon as seen on the map below. (Human's may use this map to assist in finding the locations as well):
  
  
  View Alien Landing Pad in a larger map
  


• A statistician or a lover of statistics? YES! YOU ARE SO NEEDED. Seriously. While we can find it, blow it up, calculate it, and make it look pretty, we needs us some mean number crunchin’ to present meaningful visualizations. Join up.


• MOST IMPORTANT - CITIZENS: We need you the most. If it weren’t for you, this whole thing wouldn’t be happening. We need ideas, cheerleaders, and friends to spread the word. Come out, get involved, and help us make our city better.


• Helping Hands - There's tables to be manned, food to be set-up, clean-up to be done assisting people to find their place and plenty more to be done. Join our Google Group and sign-up to assist in organising this event!
  

What Do I Need?

We will provide facilities, power, food and refreshments. Just bring your laptop, ideas, and enthusiasm to complete the mix.

Note: For those coming from outside of Hamilton, thinkhaus does have futons and a shower if you wish to request permission to sleep in the facility.

Random Hacks of Kindness

Random Hacks of Kindness is a global collaboration to bring smart people together to solve real problems using technology.

RHoK describes their model as:

"To start from identifying, defining and refining problem definitions provided by subject matter experts and local stakeholders. This ensures that volunteer time is focused on solving real problems for real people."

There are RHoK events in major cities across the world. The nearest event to Hamilton is in Toronto.

We've applied to be a RHoK site and should learn shortly if we are granted permission to use RHoK in our advertising.

International Open Data Hackathon Day

It's back - Open Data Hackathon Day and Hamilton's officially a part of this global event. What is #odhd?

It’s a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments.

We'll be video-linking with other cities around the world and working on international projects to improve humanity.

Take Action - Sign up now!

Registration for #Hack4HamOnt is now open. We request that you register separately for the Thursday evening (we need to make name tags and they'll be awesome - we're cutting them on the lazzor at thinkhaus), any meals you'll be eating, and that you register for the category of skillz that best fits you.

Go to http://hack4hamont2011.eventbrite.com/ to sign up now!

Help organise:

Open Hamilton will meet every Thursday evening in November. We need logistics, web designers, coders, graphics, and more to help with organising the event and setting up the event web page to make #Hack4HamOnt successful.

Designing the patterns to be cut on the plastic name tags, the posters to promote the event, a logo for the event, the t-shirts, helping choose what food is available at the event, promotion to local media, recruitment of volunteers, promotion of the event; these are just some of the things we need assistance with.

We meet this Thursday, November 10th, 6pm at thinkhaus. (Pizza and drinks will be provided)

Please visit the Open Hamilton Google Group, introduce yourself, and let us know what you like on pizza on our organising thread here.

Help with in-kind or prize gifts:

Do you, your organisation, or business wish to help the event by giving in-kind supplies or prize gifts to be drawn at the event?

Please contact event facilitator Joey Coleman by email: joey@thinkhaus.org