Wrapping up the Frictionless Hackathon
The first (of many we hope!) Frictionless Data Hackathon is over, and it was great! Many thanks to all who helped make it such a success the past week.
The prize for the best project, voted by the participants, went to the DPCKAN team. Well done André, Andrés, Carolina, Daniel, Francisco and Gabriel!
”I feel pretty happy after this frictionless hackathon experience. We’ve grown in 2 days more than it could have been possible in one month. The knowledge and experience exchange was remarkable.”, said the winning team.
It was also great to see participants who had never taken part in a hackathon before being enthusiastic about it. ”I loved the helpfulness of the community members, as well as the diversity of participants.”
“It was such a great opportunity to network with other people interested in data quality and open data!”
”It was amazing to see a weightless tool used in development. I want to learn more about it and integrate it into my projects.”
Over 20 people signed up for the hackathon from Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and North America. We had a very diverse audience and saw a lot of new faces. The event ran from 7th to 8th October on our Discord server. The result of those 2 days of intense collaboration were four great projects:
# DPCKAN
The DPCKAN project was proposed by a team working on the data portal of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. To ensure quality metadata and automate the publishing process, the team decided to develop a tool that would allow publishing and updating datasets described with Frictionless Standards in a CKAN instance.
The main objectives for the hackathon were to refine the package update functions and clean up the documentation.
You can check out the project’s GitHub repository (opens new window) to see the improvements that were made during the hackathon.
# Frictionless Tutorials
The main objective of this project was to write new tutorials using the Python Frictionless Framework. The team not only created a tutorial, but also wrote more detailed instructions (opens new window) on how to create new tutorials for future contributors.
You can have a look at the tutorial written during the hackathon here (opens new window).
# Covid tracker
The main objective of this project was to test Livemark, one of the newest Frictionless tools, with real data and provide an example of all its functionalities. Besides the charts and tables, the information is available on an interactive map, which also takes into account the accuracy of the official data.
You can have a look at the Covid Tracker here (opens new window).
# Frictionless Community Insight
The objective of this project, proposed by the Frictionless core team, was to build a Livemark (opens new window) website telling a story about the Frictionless Data community using the data from the community survey we ran in September.
The main goals for the hackathon were to clean the data from the survey, visualise it and display it as a story on the Livemark website.
You can have a look at the draft website (opens new window).
Four other great projects started the hackathon but did not finish it:
Dataset List, another Livemark project to list all the datapackages on GitHub, Frictionless Geojson, an extension to add GeoJSON read and write support in frictionless-py, Improve Frictionless Data Python Framework, a project to get familiar with the codebase, and Citation Context Reports, a project to create Frictionless data schemas for scholarly citations data.
Interestingly, one of the participants started off his own project during the hackathon, building a Discord matrix bridge to allow Frictionless users and contributors to join the community Discord chat using an Open standard. Even if the Matrix did not participate in the voting, it still is a notable project. If you are interested in knowing more about it you can have a look at this GitHub issue (opens new window).
On the last day of the hackathon, one hour before the end of the event, the teams pitched their projects. Here’s a recording of the event if you missed it and want to have a look:
Thanks again to all those who took part in the hackathon and contributed with their time and enthusiasm to make it so great. We can’t wait for the next hack already!