Resources
New to civic hacking? Don’t worry! We’ll do our best to help match you with a team with diverse skills. If you want to learn more about civic hacking, open data, and design before the event, here are a few links to check out.
Hackathon Resources
- Random Hacks of Kindness
- See solutions built at previous RHoK events. Is there anything that could be re-purposed for Athens?
- Code for America apps
- Code for America has built many open source civic apps.
- Civic Tech Patterns
- Common practices that may help or hinder the conception or design of your civic technology.
- Hacking is Good for Democracy
- Article by Gavin Newsom on Wired
- Get Involved, and Get Civic-Hacking
- The White House call to action
Design Resources
- Agile Designers
- collection of resources on design elements, templates, frameworks, icons, fonts, and many other necessary tools for making web projects.
- Noun Project
- open source icons
- ColorBrewer
- planning to color a map? start here!
Open Data Sources
- Data.gov
- catalog of data generated by the Federal Government.
- American FactFinder
- data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
- Census Bureau APIs
- API access to select Census Bureau datasets.
- National Priorities Project Data Tools
- federal spending and tax resources.
- Sunlight Foundation
- transparency tools, data, and APIs related to Congressional activities, political contributions, lobbying, and more.
- Sunlight Open States (MA)
- state-level legislative data, also available are bulk downloads, an API, and Python API client.
Developer Resources
- D3.js
- a JavaScript library for visualizing data. See D3 for mere mortals to get started.
- R
- An open source statistical programming language and community.
- Enthought Canopy
- Python data analysis and visualization distribution (Express version is free).
- Data Visualization Tools
- Comprehensive catalog of tools for mapping, charting, and visualizing data.
- Flowing Data Tutorials
- Step-by-step visualization guides. Many are restricted to Flowing Data members, but some are free to the public, and they are excellent.
Getting, Cleaning, and Analyzing Data
- Web Scraping for Fun and Profit
- A getting-started guide to scraping websites.
- ScraperWiki
- Web-based platform for building programs to extract (scrape) and analyze data from websites.
- OpenRefine
- An open source power tool for cleaning up large, messy datasets.
- TileMill
- An open source design studio from MapBox for making interactive, tiled maps from a variety of data sources (ESRI shapefiles, KML, GeoJSON, CSV, etc.). Integrates with OpenStreetMap.