Michigan launches civic hackathon - Code Michigan

michigan.gov

21 points·rmason··4 comments

The state of Michigan is releasing API's this fall on five themes: jobs, tourism, safety, veterans and foster kids. The event will be held October 4-6 at the M@dison building in Detroit in cooperation with Detroit Labs. Register at www.codemichigan.com

If you want to use your skills to give back here's your chance. If you want to start a company and were looking for an idea here's your opportunity. For more: http://www.michigan.gov/minewswire/0,4629,7-136-3452-308213-...

This is a project I've been involved with since the beginning. Here's my blog post:

http://www.codemichigan.com/post/get-your-secret-power

this is a great initiative by the State of Michigan. We need more gov agencies to expose their data via public api's for developers to create innovative civic apps.

I keep telling people that we can be a leader in Michigan. There are already volunteer efforts underway in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo to create city API's.

Hopefully Code Michigan can put open data on the road map for a lot of other state municipalities.

For some reason, I'm always fascinated by governments releasing APIs for public data. It seems like a data set you could do some powerful things with. When governments take the time to build out a nice API to consume this data, it makes me like them more, too.

AT&T just did a civic hackathon in Chicago with Chicago's open data portal: https://data.cityofchicago.org/browse?limitTo=apis

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