Hacking Aid

Last weekend we made the trip to Ottawa to participate in Canada's first hackathon on international aid. Tapping into Canada’s Foreign Aid Data: A hackathon for International Development "This hackathon will bring together technologists, data analysts, and international development experts from across the sector to create useful products, insights and analysis of Canada’s international aid data."

Citizen Attache, supported by Engineers without Borders, organized the event at The Hub, a coworking space.

There was press and a few high-level CIDA folks spent some of a very sunny weekend assisting and encouraging participants, including their CIO.

I was involved with one of the projects, but I wasn't a very good teammate. I spent most of my time sneaking away to talk with my new pal Michael Roberts, one of the creators of the International Development Markup Language, to discuss how we could apply this approach to a domestic setting. More to come...

UPDATE:

The organizers put together an event summary describing the projects that were worked on.