The Sunlight Foundation, in partnership with Google, Mozilla and Redhat, today announced a nation-wide weekend hackathon dedicated to coding projects that foster government transparency. Scheduled for December 12th and 13th and titled The Great American Hackathon, the network of events could lead to some really cool developments. Sunlight has some specific suggestions for projects developers might work on (see below) and lots of the unexpected is expected as well.
You can help make it happen by signing up to host an event in your town. At least a few awesome things ought to come out of it. Check out the list of what’s been proposed so far.
A tool for reporting online privacy violations to the FTC and simultaneously blowing the whistle to all your friends on your favorite social networks? That’s one cool idea. A tool for making Layar Augmented Reality endpoints easily in Django? People would eat that up. (And build projects like Sunlight’s AR Recovery.gov.) A Python wrapper for Sunlight’s competitor to Data.gov, the National Data Catolog API? A computer assisted researcher’s dream come true!
What would you like to build or build with other participants in the Hackathon? This is nerdy stuff, too few people appreciate it, but someone just might build software so beneficial to the civic interest that a parade is in order. Maybe a parade in every town that hosts a hackathon.
