We started the week out talking about hackathons in Detroit, and we’ll finish the week the same way, although #hack4detroit has a twist: Participants are using the city of Detroit’s open data portal to create apps that will benefit city residents or help streamline operations.
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Read More… from Michigan: #Hack4detroit Seeks to Improve City Services Through Open Data Portal
Along with police departments in New York City and Los Angeles, Seattle police are preparing to test body cams on officers in the field. In an attempt to find a balance between releasing footage and redacting private details, Seattle police held a hackathon of Friday.
Discussion around whether law enforcement agents should wear body cams has surged in the months since the shooting of Michael Brown. And as funding comes through for pilot programs, it's increasingly important to answer question about how these devices will be implemented.
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Read More… from Seattle Police Held a Hackathon to Figure Out How to Redact Body Cam Video Streams
For 48 hours, more than 900 Canadian entrepreneurs, innovators and amateur developers from across the country combed though raw federal data.
Their goal: Translating that information into an app, with a chance to win $25,000. The government’s goal: Engage with the data community and get an app that helps Canadians in their everyday lives.
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Read More… from Federal open data opens doors for young entrepreneurs
Shortly after his election in 2008, President Obama launched the Open Government Initiative, an effort to increase transparency, participation and collaboration in the federal government. The White House website noted that government data had traditionally been inaccessible to the public:
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from govfresh:
With the growth of the open government movement and more and more governments embracing open data, we see an increasing number of useful civic applications being developed. Every weekend hackathon spawns multiple projects that could potentially live on as a successful venture or company.
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Read More… from Five ways governments can encourage civic startups
A few items selected from many of interest that we might not have drawn attention to earlier:
Hackathon aims to produce open government apps
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