Work

The Next Data Potluck is at the Chicago Community Trust

Smart Chicago

At the first DataPotluck of the year, consultant and writer Q Ethan McCallum will explain how to put Hadoop to work for you, and how to use Elastic MapReduce (EMR), the hosted Hadoop solution provided by Amazon Web Services. McCallum will teach how EMR can help you get Hadoop in a hurry and on the cheap, without the costly cluster commitment.

Data Potluck Panoramic

Panoramic shot of the March Data Potluck meetup

You can RSVP for the event on the Data Potluck Meetup page. 

Data Potluck is a meetup group run by Young-Jin Kim, Matt Gee, and Nicholas Mader that helps to connect the nonprofit and data science worlds. You can find more information about the group by checking out their page on Meetup.

This is the first time that Data Potluck will be held at the offices of the Chicago Community Trust, 225 North Michigan, where Smart Chicago is housed. I’m especially excited to  see what kind of food shows up. Let’s do this.

GeoGit & GeoGinger: GitHub for Catrographers

Christopher Whitaker

At last week’s OpenGov Hack Night, Nick Dorian spoke about GeoGit and GeoGinger and how they can help with the process of making maps.

Untitled

One of the issues with GitHub is that it’s not a great tool for tracking changes in maps.

GitHub has a great feature that will show the differences in changes in a repository. For example:

githubdiff

You can see in red what has been deleted and the green text shows what was added for this particular commit. However, when changing arounds map data – the difference looks like this:

geodiff

Image Courtesy Nick Dorian

It doesn’t really show the changes that were made in a way that anyone can understand.

Using GeoGit, you can easily keep track of the differences in geographic data from one commit to another.

Nick explains how it works here:

While GeoGit helped to identify changes in geographic data, there wasn’t an easy way to push this information back into GitHub. So, over the summer Dorian built GeoGinger as a way to bridge GeoGit and GitHub. Here’s Nick explaining GeoGinter:

Both GeoGit and GeoGinger are open source projects that can be found on GitHub.

 

Hack Dash + opengovhacknight.org: Making it easier to get involved

Christopher Whitaker

One of the challenges in organizing volunteers around building civic web applications is that there are a lot of people with a lot of different skills and many projects to choose from – particularly in Chicago.

This weeks projects #civichacking

Over the past few weeks, Derek Eder, Forest Gregg,  Eric van Zanten and others have been building opengovhacknight.org to help aggragate information on civic innovation projects in Chicago. Now, with the addition of Hack Dash – it just became much easier for people to get involved in civic hacking!

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Livestream: Inaugural Meeting of the Health Data Liberation Group

Christopher Whitaker

In our first meetup, we’ll do some self-organizing and get to know each other better. Our goal is to get as many health data workers and thinkers together and work on how to liberate more and more health data to make it useful to people in Chicago.

We’ll have a place for people watching online to ask questions on our Google+ Page or you can just watch below. We’ll start the stream at about 6:10ish.