My Weekly Geekery: Hack de Overheid
I've missed regular updates here, but I've been quite active on the Geekery front so I have a nice backlog for posting here.
I went to "Hack de Overheid", (Hack the Government) day in Amsterdam. Like the US and UK, the Dutch government is really getting into the idea of publishing some of its data for the public to use. Then they encourage/promote/have small contests for people to do interesting things with the data.
It's a smart idea and trend: instead of the government spending millions and years building applications that no one wants, they just put the data out there. Then they let creative and intelligent people figure out what THEY want to do with it. Saves money, drives innovation, gets information into the people's hands.
At Hack de Overheid day, I teamed up with 2 other coders. With no real designers/idea people, we focused on something SIMPLE that we could successfully engineer in 1 day. 3 of us working 5 hours were able to build a Website and Android app using.... The Public Toilet Data for Amsterdam Center!!!
Ladies and gentlemen, I now unveil:
WCFinder!
It's silly, but it was a fun project and good learning experience for all of us.
Web application to be found at www.wcvinder.nl
I went to "Hack de Overheid", (Hack the Government) day in Amsterdam. Like the US and UK, the Dutch government is really getting into the idea of publishing some of its data for the public to use. Then they encourage/promote/have small contests for people to do interesting things with the data.
It's a smart idea and trend: instead of the government spending millions and years building applications that no one wants, they just put the data out there. Then they let creative and intelligent people figure out what THEY want to do with it. Saves money, drives innovation, gets information into the people's hands.
At Hack de Overheid day, I teamed up with 2 other coders. With no real designers/idea people, we focused on something SIMPLE that we could successfully engineer in 1 day. 3 of us working 5 hours were able to build a Website and Android app using.... The Public Toilet Data for Amsterdam Center!!!
Ladies and gentlemen, I now unveil:
WCFinder!
It's silly, but it was a fun project and good learning experience for all of us.
Web application to be found at www.wcvinder.nl