Meteor at the Open Data Hackathon - international (Central Asian) event

Planet Earth
1

Hey guys! Recently I’ve been accepted to the Open Data Hackathon to help journalists and civil activists in building web/mobile apps using some Open Data. This is a quite significant international event, so there’s a nice opportunity to try Meteor for social good and demonstrate its rapid prototyping advantages. But, I need your help.

I’m very inspired by the Fallen project and thinking about apps like:

Idea #1. An app to let people characterize their boring graphs with different SVG/PNG markers and make their charts more infographic-like, i.e hint about it’s topic like here.

Question: Is there a way (lib/app/package) to use own markers in charts?

Ideally, a user would (via the web/mobile interface):

  1. import their CSV/JSON data into the app;
  2. pick/upload some own markers and assign to each row (or column);
  3. pick a diagram type for the dataset and colors for each data row (or column);
  4. the app will generate a character-augmented chart;
  5. the user can share/publish/embed the chart or export to SVG/PNG.

Idea #2. Some kind of a Jeopardy-like game to help civil activists to bring attention of a general public to socio-economic issues by engaging people to play with questions/graphics based on Open-data.

Idea #3. An app to convert data sets into fun animated sequences (cartoons) similar to this.

So, I will greatly appreciate if you share your ideas, or point to some free (and easy to use) libs, apps, pictogram-sets, components, good/“half-baked” code or just give any advice which can help in actually implementing those ideas as a front-end or Meteor app during the few days of the hackathon (June 10-13).

p.s.: Among other things, found the RAW project

2

Just in case someone is looking for visualization tools, checkout these pretty cool things:

Vega - describe data visualizations in a JSON to make some charts.
Also lets you use image-markers (select “Image” in the drop-list)

GeoScene - nice tool by MIT to make data-driven maps

3

Well, just in case someone randomly gets here:

The hackathon was pretty fun and I met a quite a few really clever and nice folks.
We spent most of time in team discussions (2 journalists, 2 activists and 2 devs in each team) and trying to get the raw data to work with: first manually, then automatically extracting few bits of data from 140 reports (in Word doc format).

Then we had one day and night to actually build the application and thanks to meteor deploy we had our app up and running and updated in few minutes.

We didn’t win any awards but I have enjoyed the experience and here’s our ugly app to help people track poor electricity supply :)))

Cheers!

p.s.: Here’s a short video about our time at the OD Hackathon

4

Thanks for sharing this with everyone, Daler! This may help me in in some thoughts I have around civic hacking :slight_smile: