The Open Data Hackathon is a worldwide event with the aim of writing applications using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.  The availability of publicly funded data has already developed a thriving industry in the US, as well as seeding many of the very useful and interesting data visualisations we have seen of late.  In the UK we are now seeing a far greater degree of data transparency.  There are also some good deal of local information now becoming available.  It is with this in mind that we consider it our duty to create something awesome with it.

Though the sharing of publicly funded data sets is sometimes a slow and painful process, there are already many good sources of data out there.  Here are some examples to whet your appetite:

data.gov.uk -
Data.gov.uk is home to national & local data for free re-use.

Police API http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/ -
Provides information about nearest police stations, neighbourhood team members as well as crime levels & statistics.

http://opencharities.org/
A new project to open up the UK Charities Register

http://openlylocal.com/councils – provides list of Councillors, Committees for many councils including Oxford.

http://www.planningalerts.com/
A free planning application service that searches as many local authority planning websites as it can find.

A few of us from White October have met with Tim Davies, an Oxford based independent consultant, researcher and serious data-head.  Together we’ve bashed out some possible ideas:

Improving Oxfordshire Scrapers – check out how well the scrapers providing data for OpenlyLocal.com and PlanningAlerts.com are working for Oxfordshire Councils and spend time improving them. (Planning alerts uses ScraperWiki to gather data).

Journalism Hacks – exploring the possibilities to use data to generate local news stories.

BikeSafe – can we get data on cycle thefts?  Could it be used to find the best and worst places to leave a bike?

Of course these are just some of the ideas that we like today.  This is exactly the sort of thing that makes almost everything you read give you an idea!  What we really want is to hear your ideas and to help you make them a reality.

So are you interested but your not sure how you could help? Well this isn’t just a hacker event!  This is for designers, bloggers, activists, project managers, for anyone with ideas and for people with issues in need of hacks.  We are hoping to create the seeds of some really useful and interesting applications and it would be great if you could help us.

So here we are, the call for you to get involved!

If you’re thinking of coming then a good place to start is to sign up to the Oxford Open Data event, this will help us gauge numbers so we can leave no-one to want for anything.

If you get an idea or know of an interesting data-set then we’d encourage you to add it to the Oxford Open Data wiki page.

If you’d like to sponsor us and help us fund things like prizes, pizza or  t-shirts then please get in touch with either myself kevin@whiteoctober.co.uk or elucas@whiteoctober.co.uk

If you have any other questions about the event then please don’t hesitate to contact tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk or any of us at White October.

CSA is about building a mutual relationship between food growers and food consumers so that the risks and responsibilities of food production are shared. There’s loads more info on this on the soil association site.

I joined the group because I’m a bit of a right on eco worrier, because I quite enjoy planting stuff and because I like eating tasty locally grown produce. Perhaps inevitably, I also volunteered to help with the techy side of the website. That meant getting WordPress up and running so that they quickly had a web presence and then working on a customised template for them so that it looked good. White October have also kindly donated the small amount of hosting space required to host the site (thanks Dave).

A bit like the CSA concept, spending a bit of time doing some work for groups like this is mutually beneficial. The group gets a much better looking website than the standard (often shockingly bad) community group fare and I get to expand my skills and knowledge too – in this case I learnt all about how important it is that WordPress templates deal properly with images which are too big. Righton!

The Indian Ocean has only ever been rowed (unassisted) before by 2 people, none of them women.  Fiona and her all-girl team of four will therefore be attempting a World record next year, this time in aid of Breast Cancer Care.

We’ve given the website a bit of a revamp, including some moody skies and dramatic seas – hopefully helping to convey the enormity of the challenge they’re facing.  Faceboat will also be making a come back : this is the website that, in return for a small donation, lets you (or rather your face) make the journey with them, stuck to the hull of their boat.

We’ll keep you updated on her progress here, and let you know when Faceboat is up and running.

Good luck Fiona, personally I think you’re nuts.