Attended DataCampSEA

Woke up at 4am, took a bus, cross a boarder, and lost the way in Seattle Downtown without Google Map access; everything was to attend this awesome hackathon day, DataCampSEA. 

We gathered from 10 in the morning and had a general introduction, soon after that we started brainstorming ideas, projects and actions. 

Then we formed groups and come up with actionable items. 

After lunch, we code/design/blog and whatever we need to make things happen. And we did it. 
I was fortunate enough to work on Hear Near: here is a report from Alex Howard:

A day after the datacamp, a new app is available to Seattle residents. Hear Near pushes alerts about Seattle events nearby to mobile phone users using text messages. Hear Near is available from iTunes and Android. Hear Near was created by a team that included Amber Case (whose geolocation startup, Geoloqi, powers it), Aaron Parecki, Joe McCarthy, Jesse Kocher, Gene Homicki, Naoya Makino, Steve Ripley, Rebecca Gutterman and Jenny Frank.

Civic developers gather to code for America at data camps | Gov 2.0: The Power of Platforms


Full of actions, full of communications and discussions. 
People there were all awesome! They all love Seattle; and guess what, I love Seattle too! such a great city with awesome people and working on cool stuff!
Code For America is truly committed, has extreme bias towards actions, and super talented people.
Great work everyone!   

Photo credits to Chris Metcalf.
Flickr Album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/naoyamakino/sets/72157625971423747/


UPDATE: 

Detailed reports via Joe McCarthy: Gumption: Civic Hacktivism at Data Camp Seattle

and more about Hear Near: http://datacampsea.drupalgardens.com/projects/hearnear

21st Century Data Challenges

The future will be about who has the most data, and who is able to extract meaning from it and deliver it in real time.
Revolutions: O'Reilly at OSBC: The future's in the data

This is an outstanding presentation given by the one of my visionary persons, Tim O'Reilly.
Please do watch it.



and here are things that he mentioned during the talk; not all, but just as a memo.

• Open Web Foundation
• mySociety
• 8 Principles of Open Government Data
• Data.gov
• Truly Open Data - O'Reilly Radar
• Code For America
• Google Shrinks Another Market With Free Turn-By-Turn Navigation - O'Reilly Radar
• The State of the Internet Operating System - O'Reilly Radar

You may also like this video.

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed yet. William Gibson

Handling the cornucopia

A special report on managing information: Handling the cornucopia | The Economist

Knowledge has become so specialised that it is impossible for any individual to grasp the whole picture. A true understanding of climate change, for instance, requires a knowledge of meteorology, chemistry, economics and law, among many other things. And whereas doctors a century ago were expected to keep up with the entire field of medicine, now they would need to be familiar with about 10,000 diseases, 3,000 drugs and more than 1,000 lab tests. A study in 2004 suggested that in epidemiology alone it would take 21 hours of work a day just to stay current. And as more people around the world become more educated, the flow of knowledge will increase even further. The number of peer-reviewed scientific papers in China alone has increased 14-fold since 1990.

It is impossible to consume all the information available to make any kind of decision; now we need technologies to filter the information or even to read the information for us.

Some people are even questioning whether the scramble for ever more information is a good idea. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, identifies “information hazards” which result from disseminating information that is likely to cause harm, such as publishing the blueprint for a nuclear bomb or broadcasting news of a race riot that could provoke further violence. “It is said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” he writes. “It is an open question whether more knowledge is safer.” Yet similar concerns have been raised through the ages, and mostly proved overblown.

Emerging technologies like the Semantic Web and Topicmarks may only be the first attempts to replace reading from a machine with reading by a machine.

The United Kingdom Launched data.gov.uk

The OpenData movement has been a global phenomena. The Government of the United Kingdom has launched data.gov.uk, inspired by Data.gov: a U.S government website to "to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government."

They Gave Us The Beatles, We Gave Them Data.gov | The White House

There is a nationwide movement to unlock public data. Governments of all sizes are unlocking the value of data for their constituents. Washington, D.C., San Francisco, the City of New York, the State of California, the State of Utah, the State of Michigan, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have launched data.gov-type sites, as have cities in Canada and the UK. All of these sites are dedicated to breaking down longstanding barriers between governments and the people they serve -- facilitating collaboration and transforming dry data into tools that can improve people’s lives.

Providing more data to public and enabling third parties to develop apps by using the data, governments will become more accountable and transparent, and the public will widely benefit from the apps.

Also, it is an important step for governments to engage with the public and notice that it is more effective for governments to work together with the public in order to provide better services and improve the society.

More Cities are Opening Data

I am very excited to see that City of Vancouver launches version 2 of the beta Open Data website.

Personally I have not had a chance to use the data and make apps yet, but I have been following them to find a way to involve in it.

I have seen that more cities are launching Open Data websites. For example, Toronto has toronto.ca/open, and now the City of Edmonton has also launched Open Data Catalogue.

These movements are very important to both citizens and governments. Governments have tremendous amount of data, but often these are closed and not easily accessible. By opening data to public, developers are now able to use that data to make more useful apps and often help governments provide better services.

There are many examples of this, and here are just few: everyblock.com, stumblesafely, fixcity.org, CleanScores.com and among many others.

I would love to explore more of these, and I am very looking forward to seeing more interesting actions to come.