Saturday night – HackVT

Wonderful day.. Diane and I took the most gorgeous hike this morning out at little river state park.. S it was a perfect fall walk.. broad woods roads, bright leaves and history as we walked through the remains of a town that once stood up in these mountains.. All that was left now was a few old cemeteries , a well , some bits of iron and some orchards gone to wild.. It was s beutiful my heart ached…

and you’ll have to take that on my word as I seem to have lost all my pictures from the hike when I cleaned off my phoen this afternoon as I prepped for the HackVT judging.. This is the second year where i’ve been a judge on the Vermont Open Data Hackathon.. This year we had 131 people, 31 teams who worked for 24 ours on projects ranging from insurance calculators to art catalogs for the state. It was so muhh fun.. especially since I didn’t have to stay up working all night.. All i had to do was meet up with my three co-judges and pass judgment. It was really great !

One thing that struck me is that for all the noise we make on ‘open data’.. most of these folks don’t think of open data as anything different than any other data thats out there.. if you can find it.. it’s open.

my favorite thing was to announce the winners.. I got to announce the first prize.. .. some folks who did a very cool insurance calculator for the states new insurance exchange.. I know it may not sound exciting. but it was !