This Weekend, Hack Away With #CodeAcross and Open Data Day

| Matt Stempeck and John Paul Farmer

This weekend, New York City is all about open data. On February 21 and 22, the New York tech community will be celebrating two benchmark events: #CodeAcross and International Open Data Day. Birthed from the same passion to realize the potential of open data and civic technology, this weekend’s events seek to initiate newcomers into the world of data and bring practitioners and community members together to create new value from our community’s data sets.

We’ll kick off the weekend at Microsoft’s Times Square headquarters in a conversation with New York City’s Chief Analytics Officer, Dr. Amen Ra Mashariki. BetaNYC’s Noel Hidalgo will deliver questions to Amen that have been crowdsourced from the community. Ask Amen your question here.

This Weekend, Hack Away With #CodeAcross and Open Data Day

Then, on Saturday and Sunday, we’ll celebrate Open Data Day and CodeAcross at our partner Civic Hall. #CodeAcross NYC is an open event aimed at directing the incredible energy and talent of the tech community toward some of our community’s most pressing challenges and opportunities. The two-day festival brings together governments, community groups, academic organizations, and individuals passionate about data to create impactful solutions.

Cities around the world will band together to gain insights from datasets, make new applications, drive forward existing projects, and altogether use open data to show how sharing information can transform how governments operate and how society solves problems. Through the use of data platforms like SQL, HDInsight, Microsoft Azure, Excel, and Power BI, citizens can partake in civic engagement that promotes openness through all facets of government.

We’re proud that NYC has more open data sets than any other city. There is a plethora of data to be used for public good,particularly when you include BetaNYC’s community-maintained open data sets.  With hackathons, unconference sessions, a workshop on mapping open data, and a series of themed challenges designed to improve the City of New York’s data and its usage, the next few days will be especially busy. Importantly, these events are open to all – technical and non-technical, governmental and non-governmental – and aimed toward teaching about open data, in addition to building new tools and apps. Because realizing the impact of civic technology, in general, and open data, in particular, requires an all hands on deck approach that will continue long past this weekend. We hope you’ll join us.

Register for #CodeAcross NYC at https://codeacrossnyc2015.eventbrite.com.

Want to work toward public good through civic tech past #CodeAcross? Here’s how to hack for a cause.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,