Hacking For Justice
This post was originally published on the LSC Technology Blog in May of 2013. Note that “LSC” is Legal services Corporation, my current employer, and “TIG” stands for “Technology Initiative Grants”.
Welcome to the new LSC Technology blog, hosted here on the TIG site, and written by TIG and Information Technology staff. To kick this off, I wanted to report on a fun, exciting, and long overdue initiative we’re on: making our non-confidential data available to hackers. Let me be clear here, for those of you who have any bad associations with the word, that a “hacker” is not a computer criminal or spy. The term has been misused to connote such things, but the original and current definition of a hacker is simply someone who likes to take things apart and rebuild them better, or take things apart and make new things out of them. Most recently, hacking and hackers have been tied to the community of civic-minded web application developers who want to take publicly available data and make it accessible and relevant to their communities. And that’s the group of hackers that we’re discussing.
Hackers hold Hackathons, extended sessions where hackers get together to collaborate on projects. At the first LSC Tech Summit, United States Chief Technology Officer Todd Park addressed the group and urged us to model the behavior of the Department of Health and Human Services by holding hackathons and letting developers build the rich demographic applications that tell our story.
June 1st is the National Day of Civic Hacking. Across the United States, “Hackathons” will be held in cities of towns, and the attendees will show up with their laptops, connect to the wifi, and create map mashups using tools like Google Maps and a collection of public data sets. The About section of the website describes it like this:
“The event will bring together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs from all over the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country.”
We’re busy analyzing our data sets, many of which are already available via our web site, but not in the most flexible formats. We’re also working with friends and partners like ProBono.Net to identify more legal aid data, on the assumption that the richer the data set, the more inspiring it will be for the hackers to work with. And I’m looking into other ways to make this information available, such as submitting it to the U.S. open data repository at Data.Gov. A big tip of our hat is due to Kate Bladow, who alerted me to the Civic day of Hacking to begin with, aware of how great it would be if we could get our data sets there on time.
Two questions for you:
- What kind of mapping mashups would you like to see done with LSC and related data? We can’t tell the developers what to do, but we should be able to tell them what people would love to see, and hopefully inspire them.
- Are you a developer? Whether you’re a C++ maven or just somebody who figured out how to save a Google Map, you might enjoy and benefit from participating in the hackathon. Do consider it. I’ll be attending the Baltimore day on June 1st. See you there?
