Open Hamilton hackfest: Creating Hamilton’s water fun app

Open Hamilton is holding a hackfest on June 24 and 25 to build a data application to serve the citizens of Hamilton and make the case for the city to adopt open data.

Get Wet – Hamilton’s swimming app

A “simple” app which allows people to input the time they want to go swimming and get a list of recreation centres / outdoor pools / non-City (Ys Kiwanis Lakeland) with swimming available at the time.

Using the HTML5 Geo feature, the app will provide driving directions to the recreation centre.

The goal is to gather Hamilton’s best developers to create an application that solves a real problem. Presently, Hamilton lists it swim times on different pages across the city website with the data organized by recreation centre.

The app will be officially launched in early July during the first heatwave of the month.

It will showcase what is possible if the City adopts open data and improve public awareness of the cause.

Development of the app will create the opportunity to experiment with and learn about HTML5. There will also be social components to the hackfest.

Sign up to show your interest and receive details when hackfest details are finalized: http://openhamilton4.eventbrite.com

Open Hamilton’s mapping workshops continue with the next one on June 18, 2011 at Think|haus. RSVP: http://openhamilton3.eventbrite.com

For more Open Hamilton events and discussion, join their Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openhamilton

Open Hamilton will be relaunching our website this month. Interested in helping out? Contact them: info@openhamilton.ca