An Introduction to Civic Hacking
Open Nebraska held a half-day workshop on civic hacking1 at Interface Web School this morning and they asked me to lead it. Here’s an overview of what we covered:
- Why “hacking” isn’t a bad thing.
- Examples of successful civic applications.
- Filing state and federal public records requests.
- Scraping data from the web.
- What makes “good” and “bad” open data.
- Working with PDFs.
- Visualizing tabular data.
- Mapping geospatial data.
Wish you had made it to the workshop? We’re holding another this spring! Contact me for more information.
- Code for America defines this as “…people working together quickly and creatively to make their cities better for everyone…”. [return]
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