Hacking on Open Trail Data at NDoCH


We’re kicking off the second National Day of Civic Hacking this Friday at Epicodus (RSVP here), and we’re very excited to share all the projects coming together for this weekend’s hackathon! We’ve gotten support and ideas from Community Environmental Services, Oregon Metro, the Portland Development Commission, and many other great groups. Our biggest contributors have been all the great folks from the local tech community who’ve been coming to our meetings (thank you!).

Open Trail Data

We’ve got some special guests joining us from San Francisco for this hackathon. Alan Williams and Peter Welte from Code for America along with Ryan Branciforte from Trailhead Labs will be joining us to work on open trail data projects. Alan has been working on the Public Land and Trail Specification (PLATS): an open, lightweight data specification for public land and trails. PLATS allows trail data to be easily shared between different local governments and agencies, and consumed on the web and mobile devices. There’s already been input and activity on the specification from people and agencies all over the country. You can read more about the specification and see it for yourself here.

Trailhead Labs and Code for Portland volunteers have been working with Metro to get trail data ready to work with. There’s already been some work done on conversion tools, and one of our planned projects will involve building trail data visualization tools using the PLATS format. There’s a growing list of ideas for projects on GitHub too!

Join Us!

We’re very excited that folks from Code for America and Trailhead Labs are coming up to Portland to work with our city first. Please join us this weekend to work with these folks as well as many others!

NDoCH Kickoff Party Details
NDoCH Northwest Hackathon Details