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CivicHackathonWeekend2015

General manifesto and data sets for the Civic Hackathon Weekend 2015

Philosophy

The theme of this hackathon is 'Civic Data'. We have provided several data sets -- some new, some old -- that you are welcome to use, or not use, for your project. There are also a bunch of shape files (available on another repo) that have relevant data from around the city of fargo.

The event is held at the Prairie Den in downtown Fargo, starting at noon on Saturday 9/19 with demos at 4pm on Sunday. Try to get some sleep -- we're closing up at 1am and opening at 10am.

Competition

Remember -- you may elect to build something useful or practical, but this does not have to be the case. This is a hackathon, and you're making a hack. Make something that leaves an impression. Something quirky, and clever. Something that makes the judges say "hey, now thats pretty neat". We want to see you do something that is awesome. A successful hack shows creativity, depth, and a wow factor. Something that no one would think possible in the scope of a weekend.

This is a fun and light hearted competition. There will be prizes, and demo/judging will happen at 4pm on Sunday. Judges will want to see projects that relate, in some way, to life in Fargo. Naturally, they will also be impressed if they see software that is functional in some way, with extra points for ingenuity and usefulness.

Teams

You may work on your own, or with a team of up to 4 people.

Ideas

The best way to go about coming up with a project idea is to think about a life in the day of a citizen. Figure out what that citizen cares about, what their job is, what their passions and concerns are. Then build something that makes their life better. For example, my hypothetical citizen could be a normal, every day person who just wants to be connected with resources around them -- or other people with similar hobbies (think specific!). They could be a business analyst who wants better tools for helping to make decisions.

For every unique person, you can think of some way that they could interact with their city and people around them in a better way. This could be through a new tool that helps make decisions, or an app that connects people. Or just a game that uses civic data sources and educates. Alerts on events (social, or emergency). Information on flooding or rail roads. Games and competition using real world props. Heat maps and charts showing mosquitoes and bike share correlation (maybe with twitter to back it up!). The only limit is your imagination (and... maybe time!)

Be creative!

  • You could just work on analytics and correlations
  • You could make apps for other people to use
  • You could build a service that uses a data set mashed up with something else
  • You could just have fun with it, and see what happens

You have until Sunday at 4pm!

Further Inspiration:

Data Sets

There are several data sets that are available for this hackathon. Some of the data is available to the public, other data has been released just for this event. Feel free to ask questions, pick through the various data, and even create your own if you want.

There's a whole bunch of GIS Shapefile data available. I've done the leg work to a) curate the dozens of sets down into a few that should be relevant for this event and b) convert them all into GeoJSON, which is a flat web-friendly format.

Shapefile Repository

Go check out the Hack Fargo Shapefile Repo -- seriously, there's so much we can do with that. Get on it!

Some highlights from the Shapefile repo that are worth mention:

  • Voting precints and locations
  • Bike trails and shared paths
  • Fargo park locations and boundaries
  • Fargo Metro bus routes and transit stations
  • Schools, Colleges, Universities
  • Locations of railroad crossings and rail lines
  • Boundaries: City, Roads, River, Counties, States

More Data

Additional data sets follow. Most of these are either available in a folder in this repo, or through a link out to the internet.

  • Mosquito Trap Data. This is brought to you by our friends at Cass County. They use this data to monitor the "bug situation" throughout the County, including as an input for scheduling truck and airplane spraying. We not only have an up to date interactive map, but also historic data. Ben will be at the hackathon to answer questions.

  • Great Rides Bike Share. This data set is an anonymized set of all Great Rides trips over the past year -- about 95000! I've copied the files into this local repo for safe keeping, So be sure to go check it out. There's also some information that Aaron wrote about the data set, and a few challenge ideas to wet your whistle. There's also complete shapefiles for all of the bike lanes and shared use lanes in the Shapefiles repo. Also, Strava has a bunch of data but I'm not sure how accessible it is (they apparently have an API but I haven't looked into how easy it is to use). Check out the heatmap

  • Downtown Fargo Pedestrian and Traffic Data. So, there's a pedestrian counter on the 100th block of Broadway. There's also a traffic counter that keeps track of traffic at a few intersections downtown, as well stats on vehicle turning. I hope we can see more data like this in the future! Have some fun with it. There are also some links to the ND DOT system, which has state wide traffic data (but I could only figure out how to download it in CSV format -- no shapefiles yet. I'm only one man! You may have better luck)

  • Police Logs. Both Fargo and Moorhead (and a few other cities in the area) publish their police logs online. Now there's even a searchable filter! You can go out and find a bunch of data that you're interested in (including dates, block- level address, and description) for the purpose of finding patterns and analysis. If I get the time I'll pull down a few subsets that look interesting, and make them available in an easy to use format, ideally geocoded as well.

  • Mat Bus Mobile. This one is more of an API, and less of an actual data set. Behind the scenes on Mat Bus Mobile's new site is a slick JSON API. You can use it to get information on where buses were last seen. Combined with the transit route shape files, and you may have the recipe for some interesting project ideas. You may want to get friendly with Chrome's developer tools to see how it works. Examples:

* http://matbusmobile.com/portal/feed/v3/fargo/masterRoutes
* http://matbusmobile.com/portal/feed/v3/fargo/stops/{route_id}
* http://matbusmobile.com/portal/feed/v3/fargo/eta/{stop_id}
* http://matbusmobile.com/portal/feed/v3/fargo/vehicles

  • Traffic Cam Images. This one is a bit experimental, but maybe it'll be useful. These images were pulled from the local traffic cam. Maybe you could use some machine vision to find traffic patterns?

  • Crop Output. These were pulled directly from George Mason University, who have this huge database of crop data, county by county. I just pulled a bunch of aggregate data for Cass County by year, but you could totally run your own reports and generate specific data if this interests you. There's a serious amount of data there. There is also this other huge amount of data from the USDA if interested. Link here

  • City of Fargo Building Permits. An oldie but a goodie. These are kept relatively up to date, and combined with some of the other GIS shapefiles, may prove useful.

  • US Distribution of Production of Oil and Gas Wells. I found this on data.gov and it looked interesting. Maybe you'll find some value there. Honestly it's pretty huge.

Misc. APIs

  • Weather Forecast API. Forecast.io is a pretty cool free resource for historic weather and forecasting.

  • Censor Demographic API. This is a project that collects demographic information for the purpose of evaluating who does and does not have broadband access. You can get coordinate-level demographic information such as income level, ethnicity, and access to broadband.

  • Social Media APIs. Twitter, Instagram, Yelp -- love 'em or hate 'em, all
    of these services have geo-fence capabilities and location services. Use them to your advantage. Search for keywords, get mashups, correlate events, find activity around you, etc.