Early Fruits of International Open Data Day 2013

This past Saturday was International Open Data Day, and with it came hackathons hosted in dozens of cities on five continents all simultaneously tinkering with apps, visualizations, data catalogs and new standards built on the world’s growing trove of public data. Of course, put a bunch of mapping geeks and civic hackers in a room – many rooms, all over the world – and they will also map themselves. Here’s just one cropped snapshot of where coders were (voluntarily) at work on Saturday:

We've rounded up some of the weekend's vast output here, although plenty of projects are still ongoing (or involved the less sexy task of scraping data off government websites).

Hackers in Vancouver built this web dashboard of real-time rental housing issues in the city:

Coders in D.C. built this beautiful map of tree species on streets in the nation's capital:

This map, also of Washington, overlays zoning data from the city about allowable density onto a map of the region's metrorail network:

In Oakland, we have a map of Head Start programs:

Also from Oakland, this is heatmap of crime data per day in the city spanning several years:

Coders at the World Bank began trying to map the geographical features of the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu for OpenStreetMap, in an effort to "provide a critical resource for disaster risk mitigation and emergency planning":

Several cities were also at work updating the Open Data Census that captures the state of open data in governments around the world. Currently, that country-by-country picture looks like this: