Open Data Day

This Saturday, February 23rd, is Open Data Day, “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.”

There are nearly one hundred events happening around the world, including one here in Boston.

I’ve put up a planning document for the Boston event. I’m very excited for Saturday! I’m looking forward to working on two projects:

Intro to Programming Using Open Government Data This is my pet project, a version of the Boston Python Workshop’s highly successful introductory tutorial that focuses on using open government data. I’m hoping to have this ready in time to run at Transparency Camp in May. (I’m also hoping to find a better, shorter name for it. If you have any suggestions, for the love of all that is succinct, please give them.)

Open Science: An Introduction course sprint Run by Creative Commons, this sprint is an effort to build a course to help people understand, appreciate and get involved with open science. From the website: “peers will learn to identify aspects of scientific publication, research, and data that make up Open Science. Participants will be given descriptions of three main areas of Open Science (Open Access, Open Research, Open Data), they will be asked to analyze the “openness” of science they find on the web, and will share their findings with peers. Finally, learners will be asked to explore online communities (organizations, activities, initiatives) and make a creative contribution to Open Science. This is an exploratory course that will stress the idea of Open Science as being vital to the advancement of society.”

Hope to see you there!