NEW HAVEN >> Both serious hackers and hobbyists will be able to get their keyboarding fingers on a mass of data this weekend to try to turn it into something useful and easy to access.
CT Civic Hack Day 2015 is a chance to take a good look at the open-source information that the state is disgorging onto the web and make sense of it all, said Matthew Zagaja, an organizer. SeeClickFix, 746 Chapel St., will serve as host and hack day central. The event, part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, is open to serious coders as well as those who just want to try their hand at picking through gigabits of data.
“What you can do is, you can take the data and you can try and build different software applications around it,” Zagaja said.
For example, someone might compile all the state taxes people pay and see what happens to revenue when certain rates are raised or lowered.
“Open data is a hot topic in government these days, and cities and states are really trying to be more transparent,” said Zack Beatty, a SeeClickFix software engineer. “I think part of that was by demand and part of that’s by legislation. It’s a very good sign that you’re starting to see governments put the massive amounts of data they have [out] to the public in some capacity.”
An example of an app developed at a previous hackathon is www.towedcar.info, based on city of Hartford vehicle-towing data, that lets you know if your car was towed and to where it was hauled. There’s even a link to have a text or email sent if your car is towed. (Hartford is the only city in the state with a data portal so far, Zagaja said.)
Another possible project would be to “develop a tool that makes it easier for people to contact their legislators,” he said.
The event is in its third year. Last year, “we worked on how to track the location of a bus and put its location on a Google map,” Zagaja said. The goal is “taking raw information and data and … making it both accessible and also useful and actionable for different people,” he said.
Beatty said the data is in a “machine-readable format that takes some kind of technical skill to do something with it” and turn it into a “clearly digestible format.”
For Connecticut, “the statewide portal has all the data up there already,” Zagaja said, which will “make it easy for the developers” to massage and manipulate. He said state Comptroller Kevin Lembo also has provided Medicare data, so a hacker might decide to examine “health care-associated infections, heart attacks and that sort of thing,” comparing different hospitals.
During and after the event, others can follow the hackers’ progress on Twitter using the handle @CodeForConn. There will also be “night meetups” to take on smaller projects and check progress.
The free event will be held from 2 to 8 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. Anyone is welcome to attend; no technical expertise is required. To register, go to http://bit.ly/CTHackDay.
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