Todd Willey

The International Open Data Hackathon was Dec 4th

The hackaton encouraged creating applications using open public data to encourage governments to adopt open data policies. I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by civic hackers in Lexington, KY, and so we got together to tackle this challenge.

Open Street Map is a collaboratively currated source of geographic information

While I didn't spend time making a full-blown application, I spent my time creating a geo-framework that we could build applications on top of. Others spent their time gathering data sets from local government, experimenting with other cities' geo-apps (like pdxapi.com), and collecting data and experimenting with the tools that would drive our new framework, as well as thinking about ways we could publicize our work and engage more citizens.

Conclusion

While OpenStreetMap is nice, it is quite difficult to get OSM and the tile server (which provides images that are the background of the maps) working. The wiki articles are old and sometimes inaccurate, and the community blogs detailing the steps are either old or only solve part of the problem.

I look forward to cleaning up documentation and source code for the rails app and mod_tile. There isn't much that shouldn't be straightforward to get your own setup running on an Ubuntu 10.10 machine if you have clear instructions. I've put my first draft of notes at http://typewith.me/6QtwlpIdzr.

I want to thank everyone who has made this undertaking possible. That includes the original authors of the tools, as well as those who have contributed data. Special thanks go out to Chase Southard, Nick Such, and David Rhodus for coming out and participating. If you are interested in pitching in, join the OpenLexington Mailing List and introduce yourself.

A government cloud from NASA is exciting

Nebula is a cloud computing platform for the federal government. There are many reasons why the government having a cloud is a good thing, and why it is good that NASA is taking the lead. Having a cloud computing platform for government agencies will lower the cost, in time and in money, of implementing President Obama's push for transparent, collaborative government, which began his first day in office. NASA is perfectly poised to take the lead on a could because it is geographically distributed, has experience dealing with large computing resources, and will generate lots of data and have lots of uses to prove out the cloud infrastructure.

The benefits of working on Nebula

I love this gig. I love it because I get to work on something that will serve millions of people. I get to work with other intelligent, hardworking people. While most people worry about how to scale their single website, we get to work on scaling them all. Most importantly to me, we're building a platform for transparent government. It has been said that "Information is the currency of democracy," and working on the platform to deliver the massive amounts of data the government produces makes me happy.

It isn't just the government that is being opened. We're using and building our own Open Source Software. The first example of our software being released is the cloud fabric controller Nova, available via Github. You can learn more about Nova at Novacc.org. As we continue to improve our offering we will continue to publish code. We are eating our own dogfood, using opensource liberally throughout our infrastructure, and are dedicated to contributing our changes to any other software we modify.