We’re really excited about tomorrow’s 1.USA.gov hack day events. We’re expecting over 50 people to attend the event here in San Diego and I know our partners in DC, NYC, and San Francisco are expecting big turnouts as well. If you’re going to the event in San Diego, go meet our Lindsay who will be up there representing Measured Voice!
Even if you can’t attend in person, please join us online. We’ll be using the #1USAgov hashtag on Twitter and we’ll be chatting in SimpleGeo’s campfire room and in the #1USAgov channel on freenode irc. Don’t be shy!
If you’re planning to participate, here’s a quick overview of a few hacks that people have already come up with based on data from 1.USA.gov. We hope these give you some ideas of what you’d like to work on.
GovClicks
GovClicks is a tool we created to show daily rankings of 1.USA.gov links. It’s based on a bit of python code we call Gogogon that gathers 1.USA.gov data, filters it, sorts it, and makes it available in json and csv files every 24 hours. Gogogon is open source and available under the MIT license. Please fork it!
Bitly’s visualization of the final NASA shuttle launch
Bitly’s data science team created a video showing the location of clicks on 1.USA.gov links throughout July 8th, the day of the final NASA shuttle launch. Watch the video and read about it on their blog.
Socrata OpenData
Chris Metcalf from Socrata has created a dataset of 1.USA.gov data on Socrata OpenData. Socrata makes it really easy to analyze the click data. Chris even created a screencast showing how to create a list of the most popular links.
Chris wrote some ruby code to send 1.USA.gov data into Socrata that he’s shared on Github.
Video of clicks worldwide
Helmut Hissen created this video that shows IP-based locations 1.USA.gov clicks worldwide from 2 June 2011 to 14 July 2011. Red flashes represent clicks from non-mobile devices. Green flashes represent clicks from mobile devices. Note that the final NASA Shuttle launch occurred on July 8. You can see a dramatic increase in activity at the 1:24 mark.
Interview on KPBS
This isn’t a hack at all, but I spoke with Maureen Cavanaugh at KPBS yesterday about the hack day and explained a bit about 1.USA.gov data and why USA.gov has opened it up. Listen to the interview at KPBS.org.
Good information Jed. It’s good to know that our government is embracing social media