On behalf of the organizing team, a warm thanks to the more than 150 participants who helped make this event a fantastic success! Despite some small technical hiccups, and some problems delivering hot coffee and tea, we feel that the event went quite well. The workshops were well attended and much appreciated! Participants brought a wide variety of interests and competencies into the room, with a good balance of newbies to hard-coders, gender, students and non-students, French and English…so we feel we can say, sans hesitation, that HackTaVille! was a great success!
Still strong from this success, we don’t want to lose this momentum! More specifically, we would like to build a community from the energy and participation we saw last Saturday. To start with, we created a mailing list, please subscribe if you want to hear from us… and discuss with us! Based on this, we will see how the website evolves.
For the record, here is a brief summary of the event:
- Velobstacle (most creative mash-up of datasets) Crowdsourced & open data map of obstacles on bike path, bike accidents and bike service point.
- Hack Ton Stationnement, (most promising project and also best app at the transpoCamp Mtl 2012) – An app using parking data to ease spot selection for on-street car parking
- Previxi – An analysis tool of Bixi bike network historical data to get a short-term forecast of bike/spots availability
- Tree visualisation – A visualisation tool of the trees of the Ville-Marie Borough crossed with bike paths, so you can visit your favorite trees…on a bike!
- 3D bike accident visualisation – A non-web 3D tool to visualize the bike accident data.
- Poto – a geospatial enable board.
Here are some links concerning the workshops
- Données des villes by Ron Rayside
- Script ta ville by Nicolas Saunier
- The tools presented by Stéphane Guidoin (geospatial tools for beginners), all the links are available on the tool page.
And few lines about media coverage:
- Radio Canada (TV francais)
- Hack ta ville: A gathering of geeks (Jeff Heinrich, The Gazette)
- AMT opens up access to data on real-time train locations (Andy Riga, The Gazette)
- Hack Ta Ville will gather programmers to solve urban problems (Robert Rocha, The Gazette)
- Open source urban planning: hackathon site for cyclists (Leigh Miller, McGill Tribune)
- Hack Ta Ville brings new ideas to city planning (Marcello Ferrara)
- Pirater la ville pour un Montréal « ouvert » (Hugo Prévost, Pieuvre.ca)
- L’AMT ouvre des données au développeurs (Denis Lalonde, Direction informatique)
- This Saturday, ‘Hack Ta ville’ will make hackers out of ordinary citizens (Jacob Larsen)
- « Hack ta ville », un évènement pour créer des applications citoyennes (Charline Fornani, CIBL)
- Communiqués de presse de la Ville de Montréal et la STM.
Special thanks to the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) for operational support, McGill’s School of Urban Planning (CURA) for financial support towards food, and YellowAPI for the prizes, and your own financial contributions, for the pizza! The event made a modest surplus which will be donated to the non-profit caterer, Fourchette et Compagnie.
