Skate Hamilton is live!

As the temperature starts to dip below freezing and we start to see some snow many people also start thinking about where to play hockey and go skating in and around the city.  We at OpenHamilton decided to help Hamilton area citizens with this problem this year by building a better experience to discover rinks than the city currently offers by building SkateHamilton.  We’ve been working hard on this for about a month and recently demoed it at DemoCamp Hamilton and got great feedback.  In total we 53 rinks listed at this moment including all the city owned/operated indoor and outdoor rinks.  Each rink also has a listing of any public activities that take place at the rink.

We have also built a mobile optimized version of this site to provides a better experience to you when you are looking for rinks on the go.  We are working hard on finishing the last few parts of Skate Hamilton including an embeddable version to put on your website.  We are also planning on adding some social features so that you can let others know when you are planning to go skating or to help you organize a game of pick-up hockey.  We welcome any feedback either via Twitter, @OpenHamilton, or via our email list.

Once again this application shows what developers and citizens can do when we’re empowered with municipal data.  Unfortunately, the City of Hamilton is not providing us with much open data and all the rink data in Skate Hamilton was collected manually.  We urge citizens to contact their councillors and the mayor to let them know how important open data is to them and how it can help developers build useful apps for all citizens.

Developers

Skate Hamilton also has a rudimentary API that you can use to get access to the data inside our database.  You can see all the API information at http://skatehamilton.herokuapp.com/api  If you have any feature requests or further thoughts on how we should expand our api you can drop us a line on our Google Group.