James McKinney (mamairie.ca) and Michael Mulley (openparliament.ca) are organizing an event to encourage all of you who came out to Montreal Ouvert’s last hackathon to continue working on your open data projects. Their invitation follows:
After the great Montréal Ouvert event on the 19th, we’re organizing a follow-up hack day on Saturday, December 10, and we’d love to see you there.
The goal’s to continue working on existing open data projects. We want to encourage Montreal’s open data community by giving project leads the support, ideas, and assistance they need to keep their projects going.
Sign up here: http://hackmtl-dec2011.eventbrite.com/
We’ll be working on the following projects:
- remtl.ca: map of contaminated sites in Montreal
- KofKofMtl: Alerts based on air pollution levels
- Recreation sites & conditions: Pools, X-C trails, water quality, ski conditions, and more, all on one map
- MaMairie.ca: Follow your representatives at Montreal City Hall (and the boroughs)
- Openparliament.ca: Follow your Member of Parliament in Ottawa
- A national database of elected representatives: build a service to allow you to know the municipal, provincial, and federal representatives for any place in Canada
There’ll be someone in charge of each of these projects on the 10th, and they’ll be looking for help of all kinds — programming, but also design, research, and more, so non-programmers are certainly welcome.
These are all open source, public interest projects. Sign up to come and help out:
http://hackmtl-dec2011.eventbrite.com/
The event will be at Station C, at 5369 St-Laurent, south of St-Viateur, on Saturday, December 10, from 10 a.m. until about 5 p.m.
If you bring $10 with you when you show up, we’ll pool the money together to buy lunch and breakfast snacks. (There’s coffee at Station-C.)
Thanks!
James McKinney & Michael Mulley
with thanks to Station C, Montréal Ouvert, Montréal Python…
(Français) Pour votre prochaine application mobile, visez les téléphones stupides
Here is a brief rundown of some of the projects started, created and finished during our Hackathon. The write-up is provided curteousy of Michael Ball – many thanks!
Name “Awesomeness” Finder
The team from Open File Montreal developed an application based on a data set of family names obtained from the Institut de la statistique Quebec. The app allows you to enter your family name, and by mashing together several data sets it tells you how many people in Quebec share the same name, and how many people with your name have won the Order of Canada, or even the Stanley Cup. Craig Silverman from Open File Montreal explains that when the group was searching for hackathon ideas they came across the database and thought that since in Quebec there were very few families at the start, you could learn a lot about how demographics in the province had changed by analyzing family names. Dominique Jarry-Shore, also from Open Montreal, notes that the only other person with her name was her brother, but she does share her name with a street, parc and metro station. The app includes a name “awesomeness” rating and has the potential to tell a lot more about the story of Quebec residents as the project evolves.
Open File Montreal is a collaborative news website where anyone from the general public can pitch a story and it will be assigned to a writer. A full-time news curator manages the site, montreal.openfile.ca, and they are also on twitter, @openfilemtl.
Book Search
The book search application was made possible by the release of data from the system of public libraries in Montreal and Quebec. The app allows you to search for any book and will tell you the closest library where it is available, and also the cheapest place to buy it (Amazon or Google). The app covers library databases in Montreal and Quebec. The group behind the app hopes that this facilitates Quebecers access to books and promotes reading. The project can be found here.
Montrealphotos.org
Montrealphotos.org is a website built by Patrice Fizet and designer Daniel Mireault. After the city released 101 historic photos, Fizet made a slide show showcasing the 19th century black and white cityscapes. The idea is for the database to grow, adding historic photo collections from all over Montreal. Visitors will be able to browse by topic, era, or even personalities such as politicians and celebrities. Mireault explains that it’s important for the team to define an ontology so that as they incorporate more and more photos to the database they will be able to organize them under a coherent system of tags. In addition to browsing photos in a slideshow, the site will eventually include a map view, where photos will be overlayed on a map of Montreal, and a timeline view, allowing users to explore the site chronologically. There will also be curated collections for special topics, such as the history of boxing in Montreal – Mireault’s grandfather, Silvio, was a featherweight champion of Canada, circa 1928-1932. The site has a potential use for tourists, looking for more history behind modern day locations.
Open Trip Planner
Open Trip Planner (opentripplanner.com) allows you to find the best routes for local transport in Montreal. As an alternative to Google Maps directions, the advantage of Open Trip Planner is that it’s open source and will improve with the collaboration of users. A team member Guillaume explains that Google doesn’t want you to cache too much, so you always have to be online to use Maps. The goal is for Open Trip Planner to eventually work on a device that’s offline. Based on Open Street Maps (a crowdsourced, ‘Wikipedia’ of maps) Open Trip Planner adds a layer on top of maps that includes public transport agency data, including soon to be released data from STM, allowing users to plan local trips seamlessly. The team hopes to include data from transport services like BIXI to make the app as complete as possible.
Kof Kof Montreal
“Kof Kof” Montreal is an automated twitter feed that sends out tweets when the level of pollutants in the air passes a certain threshold. The app is based on data from Environment Canada that is updated every hour, as well as data from the city. The team explains that once built, the app could be adapted to work with data from any city.
Ma Mairie is a website that aggregates info about municipal politicians in Montreal: how present they are at city hall, what motions they have started, how they voted, and more. Project coordinator James McKinney explains that a lot of the data related to municipal governance is difficult to access, and the goal of Ma Mairie is to make this information easily accessible to the public so that they can be more informed and engaged citizens. While the idea is to give citizens a different view than what they get in traditional media outlets, Ma Mairie will aggregate relevant Google news and include the politicians’ twitter feeds and contact information.
The site will also include an application that allows citizens to submit mock budgets, similar to budgetplateau.com. James explains that whereas at the provincial and federal level it’s all about laws, at the municipal level it’s all about services. The budget app allows citizens to have their say. Ma Mairie is not simply intended to make politicians more accountable, but also more accessible with the aim to gather direct feedback and facilitate working with their constituents.
Loisir Montreal
Loisir Montreal is an application that maps the locations of public pools and skating rinks in Montreal. Adding a layer to Google maps, the app shows the location, status of the pool or rink, whether it’s open and the time it was last updated. Outdoor and indoor pools are distinguished by icons, and it even includes the water quality of the pools. The team credits in part the work done by Roberto Rocha from the Montreal Gazette who created a map public pools using data obtained from the city.
Budget Plateau extension
Budget Plateau extension is an application that gives citizens a glimpse of what it’s like to be a politician planning a budget. By playing with the budget, users see what happens each time they make decisions about when a particular service will be available, and how often. The team took on the challenge of building a sort of artificial intelligence into the app, so that the consequences of budget changes would be automatically expressed in plain language (French and English). For example, based on rules written into the code, a simple decrease in funding to a particular area might trigger a warning that “municipal workers will go on strike”.
Montréal Ouvert is thrilled to announce we have partnered with the City of Montreal, the Montreal Gazette, OpenFile and Hacks/Hackers to make this the best hackathon yet.
The event will take place at Montreal city offices at 801 rue Brennan in a beautiful room looking onto the Lachine canal. A big thank you to the city for warmly hosting open data activists and friends.
The city will also launch a great new data set: catalogues for all 43 municipal libraries! – that’s over 14 million data points.
With over 80 people signed up for the event on November 19th, the Montreal Ouvert team is expecting an amazing day of creation and collaboration.
This Hackathon will have a slightly different format to improve participation from all citizens. A number of small and accessible workshops will be given on data driven journalism, access to information, and data visualization. Open data project creators will demonstrate past Montreal data apps and the Montreal library staff will be on hand to help with their new data set.
The Montreal Ouvert team will be there to welcome everyone and guide you to the right place.
The day will start at 9 h 30 and will conclude around 16 h with presentations of the work accomplished by the participants.
Partners
The City of Montreal recently adopted an open data policy and launched a web portal donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca that has already received thousands of visitors in under two weeks.
Montréal Python is a group of software developers who are passionate about data and technology. We are certain they will energize the room and create some amazing apps for all Montrealers to use.
The Montréal Gazette, OpenFile, and Hack/Hackers are big data users and their participation demonstrates the growing importance of data in journalism.
If you do not already have your tickets, please go to the eventbrite page and grab your free tickets or sign-up for the full day of food, fun and t-shirts!
Workshops
Workshop A (10 h à 10 h 30): Everything you wanted to know about FOI requests but were afraid to ask. – Led by Linda Gyulai, civic affairs reporter for the Montreal Gazette
Workshop B (11 h à 11 h 30): Data! What is it, and what is it good for?
Led by Sébastien Pierre – Co-founder of Montréal Ouvert and founder of FFunction
Workshop C (13 h 30 à 14 h): Hands-on data visualization.
Led by Sébastien Pierre – Co-founder of Montréal Ouvert and founder of FFunction
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