With MontrealOuvert’s first Hackathon last Saturday, more than 20 developers and hackers gathered to research and tinker about ways to get, display, and make available data from the City of Montréal and other affiliated organizations.
As commented in a previous mtw post, MontrealOuvert aims to open up local data access to citizens. One of the obstacles though is that there is currently no open data available, even though there are interests from the City. So it’s not a surprise that many developers discussed first on ways to extract data from the different websites, such as scraping HTML pages or extracting information from search queries. It’s not a long-term technical solution, but should give developers enough data, a starting point to develop interesting applications, and also prove at the same time the value of the MontrealOuvert movement, both to citizens and local governments.
Applications researched and further developed at the Montréal hackathon included resto-net.ca, a nifty web app revealing infractions by restaurants and food retailers
Another useful app was Patiner Montreal, a openstreetmap mashup showing skating rings in Montréal. There were also lots of work done on getting detailed Montreal budget, data from STM, election data, or real estate information, as listed on the Hackathon wiki.
By all measures, this first developer hackathon has been enormously successful. It had highly skilled developers, great ideas and discussion, good guidance and support from the MontrealOuvert team who created a developer-friendly atmosphere; and above all, it turned out useful results and applications in a short time. I was myself surprised because with Marc-Antoine Parent, we managed for instance to extract Montréal events from the accesculture website, in less than a few hours. Granted, a working algorithm doesn’t mean you are doing a successful application that will be used by real citizens, but it’s one of the majoar obstacles.
Congrats to the MontrealOuvert team and to all the other developers at the hackathon!
Comments
Montreal Tech Watch December 06, 2010
Hackers making great strides for open Montreal Data http://bit.ly/fHj62y
heri December 06, 2010
RT @mtw Hackers making great strides for open Montreal Data http://bit.ly/fHj62y
dario soto December 06, 2010
RT @mtw: Hackers making great strides for open Montreal Data http://bit.ly/fHj62y
Canada Tech Eqentia December 06, 2010
Hackers making great strides for open Montreal Data http://eqent.me/dGnitC
CVCA Team December 06, 2010
Hackers making great strides for open Montreal Data http://eqent.me/dGnitC
Marc-Antoine Parent December 07, 2010
Plaisir avec du XSL au hackaton Montréal Ouvert en fin de semaine. Compte rendu: http://tinyurl.com/236gabr code: http://tinyurl.com/2dw8t2l
Réseau Action TI December 07, 2010
Hackers making great strides for open Montreal Data | Montreal Tech Watch: http://bit.ly/eCBp9i #QCtechno
Ken Dresdell December 07, 2010
Premier "Hackathon" à Montréal – http://tinyurl.com/3xe7lyt
Montreal Tech Watch » TrainingMobs and MontrealOuvert featured at Mtl New Tech December 07, 2010
[...] wrote more about MontrealOuvert here. What I found interesting tonight was the level of interest from the audience, which recognized the [...]
Montréal Ouvert December 08, 2010
excellent rundown of the hackathon http://bit.ly/gt14ze
Montreal Tech Watch » Patiner Montreal on Android December 27, 2010
[...] Montreal was mentionned already in the latest hackathon, as one of the most advanced applications. There is now an Android application, made in record [...]