Open Data Platform Provider Socrata Sponsors National Day Of Civic Hacking, Donating Data Hosting Platform And Technical Support

Seattle, Washington (PRWEB) May 29, 2014 - Socrata, a Seattle-based cloud software company focused exclusively on democratizing access to government data, today announced its second year as a major sponsor of the National Day of Civic Hacking (NDoCH). This year’s event will take place May 31 - June 1, 2014. Focused on supporting data access and innovation, Socrata will offer free API-enabled data hosting to community groups, in-person and remote technical support, and guidance on civic hacking throughout the weekend.

This second annual National Day of Civic Hacking is expected to bring together more than 11,000 citizens, including government staff, business leaders, concerned citizens, researchers, developers, and educators, attending more than 100 simultaneous civic hacking events across the US and around the world.

“The National Day of Civic Hacking builds a stronger connection between governments and citizens, encourages innovation, and gets new people excited about open data. By offering free, API-enabled data hosting to community groups, educational materials, and offering technical support to nearly half of the US events, Socrata is putting its full support behind the event on a national scale to ensure that great innovation results,” says Socrata Founder and CEO Kevin Merritt.

All of Socrata’s resources for the NDoCH can be viewed at http://www.socrata.com/ndoch. This is the second year that the Socrata Open Data Server Community Edition™ will be available as an underlying data hosting platform for community groups. More than a dozen locations have currently signed up to utilize this platform, including Houston, Texas and Columbus, Ohio. Socrata Director of Product Development and Developer Evangelism Chris Metcalf will be available to all users of the platform through an online video chat the entire weekend, answering questions about API use and app creation.

“Socrata’s platform offers an unmatched toolkit for innovation. Within minutes, anyone can create embeddable maps, run complicated filtering and analysis of data, query an API to feed an application, and more. Our goal is to help everyone involved in the National Day of Civic Hacking create the most inspiring and useful products possible in the shortest amount of time,” says Metcalf.

Some of the cities where Socrata will be participating in-person include: Arlington, Va.; Atlanta, Ga.; Austin, Texas; Baltimore, Md.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Boston, Mass.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Chicago, Ill.; Columbus, Ohio; Houston, Texas; Indianapolis, Ind.; Los Angeles, Calif.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Nashville, Tenn.; New Orleans, La.; New York, N.Y.; Raleigh, N.C.; Rockville, Md.; San Francisco, CA.; and Seattle, Wash.

Intel is the national sponsor for the event with additional support from the Knight Foundation. The operations team is led by SecondMuse and includes Code for America and Innovation Endeavors.

“The National Day of Civic Hacking offers the chance to bring together some of the best and brightest minds in the technology arena to push forward civic innovation and open idea-sharing,” said Carol Coletta, Knight Foundation Vice President for Community and National Initiatives. “We hope to see some promising prototypes come out of the event that will contribute to the success of cities across the country.”

About Socrata

Socrata has already established itself as the leading company in open data for more than 100 governments and organizations on five continents. Delivered as turnkey cloud services, Socrata’s data consumerization products help organizations unlock data and transform it into useful information that everyone can easily access, visualize, share, and reuse. Innovators like the country of Kenya, the cities of Chicago, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Nashville, the United Nations Development Programme, the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, and the Department of Health and Human Services have all chosen Socrata as the data sharing platform for their open innovation initiatives.

To learn more about Socrata, visit http://www.socrata.com or follow us on Twitter @socrata.

Contact

Steven Gottlieb
steven.gottlieb(at)socrata(dot)com
206-427-9591