Northwood News ♦ October 2013

Hackathon Coming This Month!

By Paula Bienenfeld, MoCo Civic Federation

The Civic Fed is teaming up with the Sunlight Foundation, the Montgomery County Taxpayers League, and the Parents’ Coalition of Montgomery County for our first annual “Hackathon,” #hackMontgomery.  The hackathon is tentatively scheduled for the weekend of 26-27 October 2013.

What is a hackathon?  A hackathon is a concerted effort to collect, or “scrape” data available from, in our case, Montgomery County, and make the data available in an easy to use format.

Here are two examples we have come up with:

• Bus Routes.  Ever try to figure out how to get from point A to Point B using the Ride-on website?  Unlike wmata.com, you can’t just type in your location and your destination and get a route online.  This project would take the route data and put it in a usable format so it would be easy for bus riders to get to where they want to go.

• Filing a Maryland Public Information Act Request.  Every so often you need to file an MPIA at the County level to obtain data from a County agency.  How is it done?  What is the format?  For many of us, it involves writing a letter from scratch and figuring out the appropriate official and their contact information.  This project would create an application that would provide an electronic form to complete, and an easy-to-look-up contact with his/her information.  In addition, the project would retain the MPIAs, so we can all know if similar, or related, MPIAs have been filed.

Do you have an idea for a project for the hackathon?  Let us know.  We are on twitter, at #hackMontgomery, and there will be more information on the website, at www.montgomerycivic.org.   ■