We live in Montréal and we hack Python code; this is who we are. Right now, it just got event more exciting to be a hacker in this city. We hack code, but when our code interacts with cool data, the dance is a lot spicier. On Wednesday, the city of Montréal made us proud by releasing a lot of it's data under a very permissive license. This is a first in the province of Québec.

Montréal-Ouvert has already been planing on hacking on Saturday November 19th. Now that it has become exciting with real data, we want to make sure that there's going to be a lot of Python code written there.

We don't know yet where the hackothon will take place, but we trust that it's going to be near downtown, somewhere within walking distance from a metro station. We will be there, and if you like to write Python code and plan on being there, write you name in the comments below; we're going to assemble a corrosive Python strike team.

Here's some ideas for cool projects we could undertake during this one day event:

  • A site where people could suggest and vote on what dataset the city should release next. Think of something like Reddit or Ubuntu BrainStorm where someone could say "hey, I'd love to make a Patiner-Montreal clone for ski" or "let's make homebrewing more fun by indexing the water hardness data by burough."
  • A cross-correlation of the datasets already published; can we use the demographics data to visualize how many firemen there are per resident in all of our burrows? How about policemen per resident? What if we bring an extra dimension, like average revenue per burough?
  • An aggregator of existing and upcoming applications: a site where it's easy to see what everyone is doing with the open data of Montréal and with all sorts of metadata like the GitHub repo and the contribution process. Voting on the best applications would make it event more fun.
  • A flexible and intuitive calendar of the festivals and cultural events that makes is easy to browse by date, location and genre.
  • An integration of all this new smoking hot data with Open Street Maps. Mapify all the things!

So, we're going to be there. Who else is in?