Sunlight Labs

Calling all Pittsburghers interested in open government, government transparency, government 2.0, and the reuse of government data: let's get together for the Great American Hackathon: the Pittsburgh Edition. We will be one of at least seven events held around the country as part of the Sunlight Foundation's National Hackathon, "an open, distributed, nationwide hackathon to develop open source applications to open government."

If you are new to the open government scene, don't worry: we will start with a tutorial on the concepts of open government and existing projects and data sources in the field. Participants will have time to to talk about open government projects that interest them. There are many projects to hack on for the day (see, for example, http://sunlightlabs.com/projects/).

For those looking to join in on an interesting project, we will be hacking on Making Sense of the Stimulus: "This project aims to make sense of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and its impact on the USA....Deciphering the Recovery (aka the Stimulus) is a large enough playing field to encompass many techniques and perspectives while narrow enough for the class to wrap our collective minds around and make substantial progress in studying. Even with the hype, the transparency of ARRA is unprecedented. Does ARRA represent the future of government openness or will it prove to be an aberration? What happens with ARRA will have a lot to say about the future of open government/government transparency/open data/gov 2.0 in the US. "

Although there is free wifi available at the Carnegie Library, you will need a library card to access wifi.

Address: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Squirrel Hill Branch (5801 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA‎ 15217) and Uncle Sam's Subs (for lunch beforehand)