The Data for Democracy Hackathon is Over!
Or: We’ll Always Have Slack
After a flurry of activity that brought in 220 new members and pushed us over 101,000 messages on Slack, the first Data for Democracy hackathon has ended! Thank you so much to everyone who helped to make this event a success by generously contributing time and energy, whether online or in person. The work to use data for social good still continues! Read on to find out more about the projects that took place this weekend, and how you can get involved.
The People
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are some of our favorite photos from this weekend’s in-person meetups, where volunteers collaborated on data projects of local, national, and international scope — and, in many cases, met each other in person for the first time!
The Product
In addition to the work that was done on existing D4D projects, some very exciting projects got underway this weekend. Here are just a few examples of what was done!
On Friday evening, longstanding D4D partner ProPublica (in conjunction with the New York Times and the Associated Press) posted financial disclosures for 180 White House staffers. D4D volunteers rose to the occasion immediately to convert these documents into structured and accessible data, available here on data.world. They also created the above preliminary visualization to map the network of connections — people are rendered in red, and organizations are shown in green.
The Louisville team built an API of the 2017 Kentucky General Assembly, to make it easy for anyone in the state to look up the voting record of their legislators. The above is a first attempt at a visualization using this data — the Democrats who voted for GOP-sponsored bills.
Volunteers in NYC analyzed child adoption rates and created a decision matrix to explore how adoption is affected by race.
And there’s much, much more that took place this weekend — check out our Youtube playlist for recordings of our community showcase, where volunteers presented highlights from their work! We’ll also have a “Spotlight Series” on this blog in the coming weeks, featuring a more detailed look at several hackathon projects.
The Potential
So, what comes next?
If you couldn’t participate in this weekend’s hackathon, no worries! A weekend, as action-packed as it might be, is a short timeframe. Lots of these great projects have only just gotten started, and will be continuing past this weekend. We encourage you to join our Slack team, catch up on what’s happened so far, and then jump in to help. This was our first (and hopefully not last) global hackathon, and any future similar events will be announced through Slack.
We’d also like to emphasize that Data for Democracy started out as an online community, and remains Internet-based first and foremost. No matter where you are, you are still very much welcome and encouraged to be involved. The bulk of the activity takes place on Slack, so you needn’t worry about missing out!
We enjoyed the pizza, the stickers (thanks, data.world!), and the great coverage in GeekWire and local media. But ultimately, this hackathon was meant to provide an opportunity for a community of civic-minded data enthusiasts, spanning all levels of skill and experience, to come together and figure out ways to contribute to the public good through the use of data. Thank you all for making this happen, and for reminding us of what is possible when we work together and put our minds to it.
Let’s keep going.
