bowdenweb

Code for Hampton Roads celebrated Document Freedom Day 2013 on March 27th, along with 57 other user groups across the world. dfd luckily occurred on the date of our weekly meetup, so it seemed only natural to tie it into one of our group projects, hrvawiki.org. Unlocking (liberating) data is also core to our values, so participating was a no-brainer. Our “celebration” consisted of freeing data locked in proprietary formats and relocating the data into the wiki.

Document Freedom Day 2013 was a rousing success for us in terms of turnout: ten members (some new!) showed up and aided in the data liberation. Roughly ten new pages were added to the wiki, along with a few pictures and maps. While that may not seem exponential, it was a 16% increase in the wiki’s total number of pages. Furthermore, the number of participants was nearly double from our previous meetups. Lastly, as a badge of honor, Code for Hampton Roads was the lone participating group from the United States.

Overall Document Freedom Day 2013 was a success: we added content to our LocalWiki, while achieving the main goal of liberating data to be shared on the web. Serving the same purpose(s) was quite beneficial and hopefully next year’s dfd will be even more liberating, not just for us, but internationally! It would be sweet to see all of the brigades involved next year! Imagine what could be accomplished!

Meanwhile, we’re going to keep plugging away on our current goals: hrt Bus api App, hrvawiki, and App for Clean the Bay Day. Aside from our weekly meetups, we also have National Day of Civic Hacking: Hampton Roads, and Clean the Bay Day events coming up. Join us!