Hi,
At our local hackerspace, we’ll be making our 5th edition of the Data Week (in Spanish) hackathon/workshop in Bogotá, Colombia, as a preamble of the upcoming AbreLatam/Condatos events that will be also in Bogotá on next November and trying to bootstrap a productive conversation from civic society on open data, governance and commons (but we’re not related with abrelatam/condatos in any way).
Our theme will be the Twitter Data Selfies, where we’re going to see the data we produce in Twitter trying to answer the questions: Do we monologue or dialogue in Twitter?, and then we’re going to invite some public figures to take their data selfie, to look at their communication dynamic in social networks. We’re particularly interested in politicians, public institutions, foundations and (h)ac(k)tivists dealing with themes of openness, transparency & privacy, when they’re mediated by digital tools, and we would like to have a public gallery of the data selfies fo these actors.
Our data week tries to go beyond the criticized short and volatile model of the popularized hackathon, and be more faithful to the grass root model, where hackathon, as an event, is more a bridge between past and future of a (pre-existing) community, bringing old members together and welcoming new ones. Thinking in the newbies, the data week is also a workshop, where we learn based mostly on hands on experience. Our themes are recurrent, but with each iteration, the domain specific visualization become more mature and usable, so domain experts, activists and others can use them more fluidly.
I’ll keep you posted on how this advances.
Cheers,