Last December, hundreds of people gathered at the Maison du développement durable for TransportationCamp Montreal 2011, an “unconference” dedicated to transportation questions organized by the Living Lab of Montreal. Given the popularity of last year’s associated open data hackathon, we’ve decided this year to organize HackTaVille, an independent hackathon two weeks before TranspoCamp.
About HackTaVille
HackTaVille will increase the scope of last year’s hackathon to include related topics like urban planning and sustainable development. Open North is co-organizing the event with McGill University and école Polytechnique to create links between the “hacker” world and academia, with the hope that each group may gain insights from the other. We expect to be joined by experts and professionals from public bodies to share their experiences and points of view.
To fulfill this vision of exchange, workshops will run alongside the open data hackathon. The purpose of these workshops is to introduce to all participants the hacker method and new computer tools in the fields of transportation and urban planning. Experts and hobbyists in these fields will come away with a better understanding of what they can do with the available tools (open source!) and data (also open).
Like many other open data hackathons, new datasets will be released in anticipation of the event. We can already announce the following:
- On-street parking data
- The exhaustive list of trees for the City of Montreal
- Land use (residential, commercial, etc.) for the metropolitan area
- Bixi use data (bike and bike dock availability)
Hacktaville is closely related to TransportationCamp taking place two weeks later on September 21st 2012. Participants of the hackathon are invited to join TranspoCamp to present their work to the transportation-oriented crowd.