November Hack Night


Hello people of Portland! We’ve got some guests from various great projects joining us for our monthly hack night this Tuesday. RSVP on meetup for pizza!

OpenStreetMap, Building Footprints, and You

PDX-OSGEO and MaptimePDX have teamed up with the City of Portland to import building footprints into OpenStreetMap. They started working on this project at a hackathon last Saturday and we’ve invited them to continue working at our November hack night this coming Tuesday.

Read more about it: Let’s Import Buildings to OSM!

OpenTrails update with Trailhead Labs

Ryan and Jereme from Trailhead Labs are in town and have graciously offered to give us an update on all the hard work they’ve been doing around the OpenTrails spec since we last saw them at our National Day of Civic Hacking event. Here’s some info on what it’s all about:

OpenTrails (the Open Trail System Specification) is an open data format designed to help governments at the local, state, and federal level publish digital trail maps for visitors. Versions 1.0 and 1.1 were developed in 2014 with formal input from a variety of stakeholders, well-documented governance, and a proven use case for digital maps and apps.

OpenTrails enables agencies to create high-quality interactive maps, combine data with other agencies in their region, and provide well documented open data to web and app developers.

Trailhead Labs, a core contributor to OpenTrails, will be giving a brief update on adoption across the country, some ongoing open source projects that do cool things with OpenTrails, and a brand new API that aggregates and surfaces OpenTrails data across the country.

More info at Open Trail Data.

CCC Presents: Avenues to Advocacy

We may also have someone come in to talk about the Avenues to Advocacy project and the hackathon we co-hosted with the Community Cycling Center a couple of Saturdays ago. Lillian Karabaic will discuss the tool and demo the progress at the Bicycle Lunch and Learn on November 20th, and maybe give us a preview of her talk this Tuesday!

Here’s the recap of the hackathon if you want to find out more.

HackOregon unveils Behind the Curtain

Our friends at HackOregon had a launch party to unveil the work they’ve been doing on their Behind the Curtain project. They’ve gathered an amazing amount of campaign finance data from the State of Oregon and turned it into some great visualizations to help people understand the role money plays in campaign politics. There’s plenty of info from the last election – for example, here’s the Vote Yes On Measure 92 fund vs. the NO On 92 Coalition fund. If we’re lucky we might also get a visit from one of the HackOregonians who can tell us more about it.

Check out the Behind the Curtain beta!

Be There or Be Square

We hope to see you this Tuesday! After a few short presentations we’ll get to our usual hacking and chatting and pizza-eating.

More event details are available on the meetup page.

Psst.. help us out!

You may have noticed we’ve been short on blog posts lately. That’s because we need help! We’ve been spread pretty thin between all these great projects and we are but a rag-tag bunch of volunteer organizers. If you love writing about civic hacking and want to help out please let us know at [email protected].