Slashdot Mirror
US Government Announces National Day of Civic Hacking
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday in a post at the White House website, the U.S. government announced that June 1-2 would be the National Day of Civic Hacking. 'Civic Hacking Day is an opportunity for software developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs to unleash their can-do American spirit by collaboratively harnessing publicly-released data and code to create innovative solutions for problems that affect Americans.' It will be a joint project with Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for America. Activities are being planned in many cities across the country, and you can also sign up to host your own event. It's nice to see the government use the word 'hacking' in a positive way, since most uses of the term these days involve malicious activity."
And here I thought it was about hacking Honda Civics.. enough people do that you'd think there'd be a holiday for it already.
Color me surprised. Or maybe code me surprised. I thought the term 'hacker' was forever lost, stained by the media beyond redemption.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"Liberate data that can inform better problem solving in every community."
I propose we make a script that downloads all the research journals that we can, then makes massive online library of them that anyone can access. Oh wait. That doesn't end well.