The scene inside the Walters Art Museum during this summer’s Art Bytes hackathon Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend Education. Groundwork. Art Bytes. Four major hackathons took place in Baltimore in 2012. But convincing developers to show up at local hackathons has been something of a challenge this year, as JavaScript and Ruby on Rails developer Jonathan Julian [...]

Chris Whong, owner of Federal Hill-based Charm City Networks who’s presently completing a master’s degree in urban planning at New York University, has created a time-lapse, animated heatmap chronicling Baltimore city’s homicides from 2007 through September 2012.

Depicting demographic and municipal data as points on a map is a helpful way to visualize urban blight — and pockets of opportunity — in a city, as Elliot Plack has done with his map of Baltimore’s vacant houses, or as Colin Drane has done with his SpotCrime crime-mapping website. But the meaning behind seeing, [...]

Big data flexed its muscles this weekend at Groundwork, the civic hackathon hosted by the Greater Baltimore Technology Council that called on participants to delve into spreadsheets and tables of numbers to inform potential solutions to urban issues. More than 120 hackers and community leaders, as well as a team from Maryland StateStat, gathered over [...]

The Greater Baltimore Technology Council announced last week that its Groundwork data hackathon has been rescheduled until sometime “likely in late September.” As Sharon Paley wrote on the GBTC website: Some very nice people (of the state and federal variety) with access to extremely important (but not yet open) data, heard about Groundwork and proposed that they [...]