Last week, myself, Code for Birmingham, and a lot of other talented people came out for the weekend long Global Urban Datafest Hackathon. My team, the Red Mountain COALBOL Miners, worked on a project for the city of Birmingham to help convert their old proprietary datasets into modern formats that they can put in their data warehouse. This is the first big step in getting more open data available for Birmingham.
What was really great about this experience, was every challenge came from a government or city official, so we were solving actual needs and forming great relationships with our city leaders. All five teams did an excellent job, and I hope work continues on all the projects.
My team along with a project working with the Land Bank Authority both won the competition and will be moving on to the nationals. AL.com was one of the sponsors and has done some cool write ups of the weekend:
https://storify.com/AnaMariaCarrano/alabama-smart-cities-hackathon
http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2015/02/four_teams_compete_to_find_way.html
http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2015/02/teams_advance_to_global_urban.html
You can find the code our team worked on at our github page.