Civic Hackathon Code:NOLA Aims to Use Technology to Improve New Orleans

Code for New Orleans

The New Orleans Code for America fellows are inviting developers, designers, urban planners, community members and more to Launch Pad on February 24th and 25th for a civic hackathon.

The hackathon kicks off at 5:00 PM on Friday, February 24th, 2012 and continues all day on Saturday the 25th. Click here to learn more and register.

City to release new data

One of the goals of Code for America is to increase the involvement of the developer community in the transition to a more tech-centric city government. In coordination with the city, the fellows will announce the release of new datasets at the event.

Mum’s the word on which data will be released but significant discussions have already taken place around RTA data and rumors are spreading around other transportation data that may be made available.

The general consensus from city government seems to be that they would like to release more data, but the data is not in a format that would be easy to release. There must also be processes in place for the data to be validated, cleaned up, licensed, and maintained in order to release it to developers or to the general public.

Join the fun

Attending the hackathon is a great way to share your ideas about what types of data the city should release, what apps and other solutions could be built on top of that data, and what other technologies the city should be taking advantage of this year.

If that doesn’t convince you, Code for America created this great infographic to add icing to the cake (click for a larger version):