Another week of Shut up and Hack saw lots of industry at the Melbourne meet up.
The night started with Ri Liu giving a short presentation about her recent trip to Colombia as a finalist in a data visualisation prize for her work on Close the Gap – if you are interested in DataVis, check it out – it looks gorgeous, Ri has a great vision when it comes to presenting data. For those interested in working on data visualisation regularly, Ri has started a weekly Thursday night DataVis meetup.
After this we broke into very focused groups – three in particular focusing on Open Street Maps and the Nepalese earthquake, the Temporal Earth project and PTV data.
GovHack planning
Later in the evening a few of us started talking about the plans regarding the upcoming GovHack – mark July 2-4 into your calendars. In the lead up to GovHack, Open Knowledge Melbourne will be hosting a different introductory workshop on a number of the technologies available that we think are the most useful for an event like GovHack.
May 6th Scott Ludlum is talking about the Open Economy project that analyses the budget data.
May 13th The Code for Australia Fellows (the Coder Girrrlz Ruth, Alisha and Rosie) will be presenting what they have discovered in their work with the three city councils they have been placed with (Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat). This should be considered an in depth “Meet the data owners” event.
May 20th Steve, Matt and Lachlan will be talking Maps, mapping software and mapping tools – CartoDB (great for creating data, gather data, quick visualisation) and LeafletJS for mobile friendly live maps.
May 27th More Mapping and some Data Manipulation software. Steve will talk about TileMill and we will discuss tools like Google Refine, csvkit, and the JSON query builder jq
June 3rd More Data manipulation – Pandas and R – two very useful tools for splicing and dicing large data sets. Like Excel on steroids, with nice Pythonic languages.
June 10th Systems Administration – a very short introduction by Matt and Lachlan to the command line, ssh, and git. Teaching the most useful 5-7 commands for each – just enough for someone who needs a virtual machine on the weekend. We may also teach openstack if that’s a possibility. Refresher from previous week
June 17th Data visualisation, Ri Liu presenting on D3 and GovHack/HealthHack regular Fred Michna presenting Tableau.
June 24th Meet the data owners – the more general event including Victorian government agency representatives.
July 1st Will be dedicated to last minute questions and organising.
July 2-4th – GOVHACK