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by Open Hamilton

Launching Hamilton’s modified Change By Us

January 28, 2013 in Open Data, Open Hamilton

Originally posted on Open Hamilton

 

Two weeks ago, Hamiltonians gathered at think|haus, our local makerspace, and built an alpha version of Change By Us for our city.

Bringing together developers, designers, city leaders, and citizens, the event was a unique partnership that showed local talent can achieve local solutions.

Since our meet-up, the Open Hamilton team has worked to get the project ready for final polish and launch.

Led by the efforts Alex Wagner and James Arlen, the source code of Change By Us has been modified and launched on the OH server.

Our citizen contributors have created a list of improvements and modifications to Change By Us that will enable our city to better measure feedback and suggestions as we all work to improve civic engagement.

On Thursday, we need to finalize local graphics and start the next phase of the project – Hamilton improvements that can be returned to the source code.

The Change By Us project is now in its third phrase of development and we are in a position to build Hamilton’s reputation as a locale with a strong web development sector that international powerhouses should local in.

Join us Thursday at 7pm at think|haus, 25 Dundurn St North (Hamilton), for our launch hackfest.

Please RSVP on Eventbrite here: hamonthackfest.eventbrite.ca/

Event participant Dave Heidebrecht blogged about the event, read his take here.

 

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

Random Hacks of Kindness returns to Hamilton in June

May 9, 2012 in Community, Open Data, Open Hamilton, Random Hacks of Kindness

 

Random Hacks of Kindness (@RandomHacks) is a joint initiative from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, NASA, and the World Bank aimed at creating a volunteer community of innovators who use their skills to make the world a better place by tackling real world problems. The first event took place in November 2009 at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California, one of the projects that came out of that evening was Tweak the Tweet. Tweak the Tweet repurposed tweets with a syntax that allowed them to be used to connect people in need with service providers during disaster situations, it was notably used during the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Since then the event format has spread to cities all over the world.

 

 

Hamilton’s first RHoK event took place in December of 2011 at The Staircase (pictured above), you can read the coverage of the event by The Spectator here. The participants worked on building software that would allow you to send a text with a bus stop number, and receive a text back telling you when your next bus should arrive. I was able to attend the opening of the event and the weekend itself for a few hours. The passion in the room was wonderful, and I noticed in particular that the participants seemed to be learning new skills as they worked on the project together.

 

 

Sign up for the June 2nd Random Hacks of Kindness here!

 

The event organizer is Joey Coleman (@JoeyColeman), project lead of Open Hamilton (@OpenHamilton). With contributions from great local developers like Gavin Schulz (@GSMaverick) the Open Hamilton group has been able to create apps like Skate Hamilton to allow citizens to find out where they can skate using a very friendly user interface. Whether it’s local transit signs or representing Hamilton at the Creative Commons Salon on Open Data (see video below), Joey himself has been a tireless advocate for the usage of open data and open source for social good:

 

 

Hamilton is one of the smallest communities to host a Random Hacks of Kindness event. Though we may be a relatively smaller tech community, being able to punch above our weight and conduct a noteworthy event such as this grows and strengthens our community as participants collaboratively share, learn and build. Communities like Ottawa that have contests such as Apps4Ottawa give the development community and their good work a great spotlight. Random Hacks of Kindness lets us show the outside world what we can do here in Hamilton. I encourage anyone in the area interested in building apps and technology for social good to participate in the June 2nd Random Hacks of Kindness.

 

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by Gavin Schulz

New Skate Hamilton Mobile UI

February 6, 2012 in Hamilton, Open Data, Open Hamilton

Originally posted on gavinschulz.posterous.com

Since Skate Hamilton launched in late December I’ve been working hard to continue to improve it and make it more useful to Hamiltonians.  To that aim I’m happy to announce some improvements that have been launched for Skate Hamilton.

List View

On devices with smaller screens or less powerful processors using the map to find rinks can be difficult and time-consuming.  So to fix that I’ve added a list view that shows you rinks nearby your chosen location as a list rather than as pins on a map.  It also features infinite scrolling which is automatically triggered by scrolling to the end of the list.

Rink Details

The first version of Skate Hamilton did not have a great screen for showing more details about a particular rink.  In this new version I’ve entirely redesigned the rink details screen to show more information and do so in a way that is more user friendly and accessible.  You can now see the rink’s phone number and access directions with one click.

Better Performance

The entire mapping interface has been rewritten to improve performance and to minimize the amount of data that needs to be loaded at any one time.  This has made browsing the map interface much more pleasant and much snappier.

Expanded Mobile Support

Skate Hamilton now also supports Blackberry devices with BBOS 6.0 and greater.  There is still work being done on support for Windows Phone 7 and hopefully we’ll have support for it soon.

While we haven’t had the opportunity to do any outdoor skating this year due to the weather, if nothing else Skate Hamilton will be in fine form for next winter.

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

2011 was great, let’s make 2012 even better

January 10, 2012 in Community, DemoCamp, Department of Computing and Software, Hamilton, Innovation Factory, Innovation Night, Mohawk, Open Data, Open Hamilton, Startup Drinks, Startup Weekend Hamilton

2011 was a great year for software in Hamilton!

The success of WeeverApps was one of the bigger stories of the year, especially after winning Lion’s Lair. In building a product based around the unfulfilled need of their clients at CartaNova to get on to the mobile web affordably, they may have demonstrated a path to creating a startup for other Hamilton entrepreneurs to follow. It wasn’t just Weever Apps though, a multitude of area startups received attention such as Athelink, Quant Interpretations, SnapPay, Verdant Analysis and more. Hamilton’s new RIC Innovation Factory helped to drive startup activity in Hamilton with their client services and events.

Mohawk College pulled off a very successful AppsForHealth conference and its IdeaWorks Lab continued to blend industry with academics. McMaster University’s Computing and Software outreach program and Gr8 Designs for Gr8 Girls event brought the fun and empowerment of understanding computer science to a new generation, a new software entrepreneurship course helped to foster a stronger startup culture, the computer science club was more active than in anytime since the 90s, and the Don Pether Incubation Centre was launched.

An exciting Open Data citizens group Open Hamilton held the first ever Random Hacks of Kindness in the city, and produced cool apps like Skate Hamilton. Hamilton’s hackerspace ThinkHaus re-opened after a move to 25 Dundurn Street North, and thanks to them we now have retro awesome lazzored key chains. Other groups like the Joomla! User Group South Western Ontario, Hamilton Linux User Group and CIPS-GH continued to meet regularly to learn, share and build connections.

At our first Startup Weekend in Hamilton, 20 of the 22 ideas pitched were dependent upon web or mobile software development. Software startups such as Sochi, GeoFresh and Caltrakr came out of the weekend. DemoCampHamilton took place regularly with demos from startups, students, an inventor, and established companies like Factor[e] and FluidMedia; offshoot pubnight StartupDrinks now occurs monthly.

 

Looking forward into 2012, we’ve got another exciting year ahead.

For starters we’ve got DemoCampHamilton5 on February 9th, the #TechTalk4HamOnt web series covering the community is set to launch February 14th, #Hack4HamOnt2 is taking place March 2nd-4th, StartupWeekend is taking place April 27th-29th, and AppsForHealth is taking place May 10th-11th. And that’s not including StartupDrinks, Innovation Nights, Lunch ‘n Learns and various other regular gatherings.

If we work together we can make 2012 even better for the community. We can talk about it, we can tweet, facebook, linkedin and blog about it, we can bring friends into it, individuals can organize more events to benefit it, and we can help each other without expecting anything in return.

If you go to AppsForHealth this year, or even if you don’t, you can help to create a storm of tweets about the conference so Hamilton and the entire eHealth world knows about it. If you go to Hack4HamOnt, you can bring an interested friend with you too. If you see local events on linkedin, you can share them with your network too. If you see a local startup with a cool product, you can blog about it. If you think that somebody could benefit from a connection, you can make it. If you can offer experience or advice to someone, you can have that coffee or beer with them. If you have the time to organize an event for the community, there are many different events other communities do that we do not.

Many little drops put together can make a big enough wave for the world outside Hamilton to take notice, and some people can see great things happening for us. Let’s go for it.

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Avatar of Gavin Schulz

by Gavin Schulz

Skate Hamilton is live!

December 20, 2011 in Open Data, Open Hamilton

Originally posted on gavinschulz.posterous.com


Skatehamilton

 

As the temperature starts to dip below freezing and we start to see some snow many people also start thinking about where to play hockey and go skating in and around the city.  We at OpenHamilton decided to help Hamilton area citizens with this problem this year by building a better experience to discover rinks than the city currently offers by building SkateHamilton.  We’ve been working hard on this for about a month and recently demoed it at DemoCamp Hamilton and got great feedback.  In total we 53 rinks listed at this moment including all the city owned/operated indoor and outdoor rinks.  Each rink also has a listing of any public activities that take place at the rink.

We have also built a mobile optimized version of this site to provides a better experience to you when you are looking for rinks on the go.  We are working hard on finishing the last few parts of Skate Hamilton including an embeddable version to put on your website.  We are also planning on adding some social features so that you can let others know when you are planning to go skating or to help you organize a game of pick-up hockey.  We welcome any feedback either via Twitter, @OpenHamilton, or via our email list.

Once again this application shows what developers and citizens can do when we’re empowered with municipal data.  Unfortunately, the City of Hamilton is not providing us with much open data and all the rink data in Skate Hamilton was collected manually.  We urge citizens to contact their councillors and the mayor to let them know how important open data is to them and how it can help developers build useful apps for all citizens.

Developers

Skate Hamilton also has a rudimentary API that you can use to get access to the data inside our database.  You can see all the API information at http://skatehamilton.herokuapp.com/api  If you have any feature requests or further thoughts on how we should expand our api you can drop us a line on our Google Group.

 

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by Kevin Browne

DemoCampHamilton4 is just around the corner!

November 30, 2011 in DemoCamp, Hamilton, Open Data, Open Hamilton, Startup

 

DemoCampHamilton4 is happening on Monday December 5th at 6:30pm in The Arnie Pub at Mohawk College! We’ll have a keynote by Canadian New Media Award winner, Dan Zen, who will share his secret creativity techniques using new types of iPhone, Android and Blackberry mobile games as examples. Dan Zen will start by connecting everyone in attendance in a physical manner and use this as a starting point for completely new ideas in communication! Do not miss this animated speaker as he addresses his home town audience.

This will be followed by a software demo line-up that includes Hamilton startup companies and the #Hack4HamOnt. Get your free tickets here: http://democamphamilton4.eventbrite.com.

 

 

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

DemoCampHamilton3 Recap: Crow Call

October 3, 2011 in Academic, CIPS-GH, Community, DemoCamp, Department of Computing and Software, Hamilton, Hamilton Economic Development, Industry, Innovation Factory, McMaster, McMaster Industry Liaison Office, Open Data, Open Hamilton, Outreach, Startup Drinks, Startup Weekend Hamilton

DemoCampHamilton3 took place in front of an estimated 200+ members of the community on Wednesday September 28th at the Twelve Eighty pub right on McMaster University campus. The largest ever attendance for a DemoCampHamilton event was double the previous record, mostly because so many McMaster students showed up for what was probably their first DemoCamp experience. DemoCampHamilton3 had excellent community sponsorship in the form of Innovation Factory, Hamilton Economic Development, McMaster Industry Liaison Office and the Department of Computing and Software.

The event was kicked off with a keynote by the “godfather of DemoCamp” David Crow (@davidcrow) himself. Hamilton’s community is young and still learning, and David shared valuable advice about aiming higher, about the importance of “adding two zeros” to our entrepreneurial expectations. He challenged us to not to make excuses about things being easier in Silicon Valley, but to go there and do it if we thought so. David also talked about the strength of community not being in the number of nodes, but in the number of connections between the nodes. He also left us with a useful list of what to read. Thanks for coming down to Hamilton, David!

Jennifer Cameron (@JenniferVerdant) CEO of Verdant Analysis showed off their financial analysis software – the Cogent financial statement analysis tool and Forecast communication platform for the financial community. Verdant Analysis was actually a top ten finalist at the Lion’s Lair event which took place earlier in the month!

Next up was DemoCampHamilton stalwart supporters FluidMedia who did a demo of SkinnyBoard, web-based software that helps agile project teams collaborate to get work done. Somebody yelled out “I love SkinnyBoard!” before the demo could even begin, so they are doing something very right!

Gavin Schulz (@GsMaverick) and Brian Graham of Open Hamilton (@OpenHamilton) demoed the Dowsing app that helps people find the nearest public water play feature, swimming pool, or beach. Joey Coleman (@JoeyColeman) is the passionate leader of the Hamilton branch of the Open Data movement to have governments release or make open certain kinds of data in formats which afford themselves to the creation of apps like Dowsing. If you’re interested in developing Open Data applications, the group meets regularly on Thursday nights at Hamilton’s local hackerspace ThinkHaus.

Next up was the co-founders of another Lion’s Lair finalist, Brad Ross (@BradARoss) and Mike Saniga (@mikesaniga) of Quant Interpretations. They did a demo of their “QiiQ” consumer intelligence solution – a web-based interpretive solution that helps business owners and managers make better decisions: rich insights about consumers: where they live, how they live, how best to connect with them, and how to find others like them.

Alex and Ruxandra Bucataru then came up to demo their Enthuzr social marketing platform that makes word of mouth marketing easy, more viral, and truly measurable. In addition to giving attendees access to an Enthuzr beta invite, Enthuzr is also a sponsor for the upcoming Startup Weekend Hamilton event happening October 21st-23rd – way to support the community guys!

Finally we had Adrian Duyzer (@adriandz) and Martin Eckart of factor[e] design initiative up to demo HomeFinder, a site for finding new and resale homes that is similar to MLS but designed to be much easier to use. They also did a quick plug for a new web portal of the Hamilton Light Rail initiative.

Some people from ThinkHaus were handing out lazzored acrylic keychains in the shape of 8-bit era Super Mario – did you get yours?! If not ThinkHaus (@ThinkHausOrg) opens their doors on 25 Dundurn ST N every Tuesday at 7pm for an openhaus – why not pop in and check out what other cool stuff they have going on? We also had several other community event announcements. Pat Gaudet of CIPS-GH announced a talk by great Mohawk professor Duane Bender taking place at Mohawk College at 6pm this Wednesday October 5th on the state of electronic medical health records in Canada and what the future holds, reservations (required to attend) and details available here. Stephanie Shuster (@stephshuster) and Tammy Hwang (@tammyhwang) of the Innovation Factory talked about the upcoming Innovation Night taking place on the evening of Wednesday October 12th at the McMaster Innovation Park, details and registration here. One night later on Thursday October 13th starting at 6pm we will be having the first ever Startup Drinks Hamilton in the cool downstairs pub of the Kelsey’s at 875 Main Street West, register here.

Special thanks to Dwayne Ali (@interestica) for making our cool new logo, maybe you want to check out his equally well designed website Secret Hamilton that is all about exposing the “hidden gems” of Hamilton? ;-) Special thanks to Jim “microphone guru” Rudnick (@JVRudnick), Simon “unconference Yoda” Woodside (@sbwoodside), Brian Hogg (@brianhogg), Jessica Pavlin, Tammy Hwang and Stephanie Shuster.

It should also be noted that the sponsors for DemoCampHamilton3 aren’t just sponsors, they’re part of the community too, as evidenced by the Department of Computing and Software’s outreach program, the McMaster Industry Liaison Office’s STEM program, Hamilton Economic Development’s mentoring programs and networking events, and Innovation Factory’s Flight Program.

 

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

Too hot today? You just need some cool software…

July 21, 2011 in Hamilton, Open Data, Open Hamilton

With heat so strong it’s slowing down the Go Trains, everyone in Hamilton is wondering how to cool down. Open Hamilton has released Dowsing, an interactive Google Map that will let you find the nearest place to cool off in some water, check it out here:

http://www.openhamilton.ca/dowsing.html

 

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

Open Hamilton hackfest: Creating Hamilton’s water fun app

June 8, 2011 in Hamilton, Open Hamilton

Open Hamilton is holding a hackfest on June 24 and 25 to build a data application to serve the citizens of Hamilton and make the case for the city to adopt open data.

Get Wet – Hamilton’s swimming app

A “simple” app which allows people to input the time they want to go swimming and get a list of recreation centres / outdoor pools / non-City (Ys Kiwanis Lakeland) with swimming available at the time.

Using the HTML5 Geo feature, the app will provide driving directions to the recreation centre.

The goal is to gather Hamilton’s best developers to create an application that solves a real problem. Presently, Hamilton lists it swim times on different pages across the city website with the data organized by recreation centre.

The app will be officially launched in early July during the first heatwave of the month.

It will showcase what is possible if the City adopts open data and improve public awareness of the cause.

Development of the app will create the opportunity to experiment with and learn about HTML5. There will also be social components to the hackfest.

Sign up to show your interest and receive details when hackfest details are finalized: http://openhamilton4.eventbrite.com

Open Hamilton’s mapping workshops continue with the next one on June 18, 2011 at Think|haus. RSVP: http://openhamilton3.eventbrite.com

For more Open Hamilton events and discussion, join their Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openhamilton

Open Hamilton will be relaunching our website this month. Interested in helping out? Contact them: info@openhamilton.ca

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

DemoCampHamilton2 Recap: So hot we set off the fire alarm!

May 30, 2011 in DemoCamp, Hamilton, McMaster, Mohawk, Open Hamilton

DemoCampHamilton2 occurred Friday May 27th, 2011 at Mohawk College in conjunction with the AppsForHealth 2011 conference. The event was hosted by Software Hamilton and sponsored and supported by the great folks at Innovation Factory and Mohawk College. The combination of an excellent keynote, demos and audience turned out to be too hot for the fire alarms at Mohawk!

Mic Berman kicked off the event with an excellent keynote focused on sharing her startup expertise. The quality of the discussion the talk generated was one of the highlights of the evening, perhaps given the high level of interest in fostering a startup culture in the Hamilton software community. The talk was described perfectly in a #DCH tweet as “inspiring and grounding at the same time”.

Cristina Calder of FluidMedia started off the demos by showing us Rendering Exchange – a web-based, crowd-sourced platform that connects graphic designers with commercial interior manufacturers, architects and interior designers to provide high-quality, photo-realistic room scene images for use in sales and planning.

DemoCampHamilton audience favourite “mad inventor” Dan Zen took audience interactivity to new heights with his demo of Touchy – a smartphone game where two players, each with mobile devices, try to touch the other player’s screen while protecting their own. When two people play the game it creates a Twister-like physical spectacle that is as fun to watch as it is to play. Dan demoed Touchy by having the entire audience play “Touchy” at once by having us try to touch the business card of the DemoCamp-er sitting next to us while protecting our own!

Adam Caromicoli and Doris Bean of Indellient Inc. were up next to demo Inktronic – a Digital Pen based collaboration tool that simplifies workflow involving graphical content for the architectural, engineering and construction industries.

After a forced break for what was dubbed the “great fire alarm of DemoCampHamilton2″, Joey Coleman of Open Hamilton and Nik Garkusha of Open Halton talked about the Open Data movement occurring across Canada and demoed what software the Open Hamilton branch of the movement has developed thus far.

The final demo was done by two McMaster University computer science students, Gavin Schulz and Zaahir Moolla, who demoed their new service MealDeck which allows restaurants to easily create a cross-platform mobile website. Student entrepreneurism is something we want to see more of in Hamilton and the professionalism and courage these two showed by putting themselves and their service out there for criticism was widely praised – watch out for these guys!

The AppsForHealth 2011 conference itself was a huge success, you can check out the mobile apps that the students devised here. Expect the next DemoCampHamilton at McMaster in September, but in the meantime we will be having the first Software Hamilton Pub Night this June 28th.

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