DKAN + Open Data Day

The seventh annual Open Data Day is March 3, and we’re so excited to be taking part in it. Across the world, organization are putting on events to advocate for open data policies, share victories and best practices, and meet others in the open data community.

We’re really excited to be using Open Data Day to improve DKAN by involving and supporting the community in a worldwide hackathon!

Getting set up

To get started, we teamed up with our brilliant friends at the City of Louisville, who use DKAN to manage their city’s open data on everything from parking citations to voting precincts to property foreclosures. The Louisville open data team really embodies everything we love about the open source and open data worlds — transparency, collaboration, and commitment to civic engagement — and they have tons of experience in hackathons and other events that activate their technology community.

Louisville has a lot of great ideas on how to improve DKAN, and they saw Open Data Day as a great opportunity for a hackathon to improve the application, involve their community in an open source project, and spread the word about what they’re working on. They gathered their ideas and brought them to our core development team. We discussed each suggestion with the Louisville team and worked out ways to make sure new development would benefit their work and the application as a whole.

We created a series of GitHub issues representing bite-sized tasks that would make a big difference for DKAN users. Meanwhile, Louisville is partnering with their local Code for America brigade, the Civic Data Alliance, to involve their volunteers at the event. And on the day of the hackathon, the DKAN team will be available online for support while the participants in Louisville and other locations are hacking away.

How to get involved

Louisville was the first to jump on board, but we’d love to hear from you if you’d like to work on something similar in your city, if you’re organizing an Open Data Day hackathon looking project submissions, or if you’d like to join in remotely as a participant on March 3! Find us in the Open Data Day channel on dkan.slack.com, or shoot an email to kim.davidson@civicactions.com

We can’t wait to see what comes out of the hackathon day and the relationships and continuing contributions that follow!