---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Marina S. Martin <marina@marinamartin.com> Date: Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 5:53 PM Subject: Startup Weekend GOV on April 27th To: lazowska@cs.washington.edu Hello, I wanted to reach out to you about an upcoming event being put on by City of Seattle, King County, and the State of Washington that I think would be of interest to you and your students. The first-ever Startup Weekend GOV is taking place at Seattle City Hall on April 27-29th. Participants gather Friday evening to pitch ideas for Web and mobile apps that integrate open government data sets (http://data.seattle.gov, http://data.wa.gov and http://datakc.org), improve public safety and/or generally improve the lives of Washington residents. One Bus Away (http://onebusaway.org/) is a great example of such an application. Everyone breaks into teams and designers, programmers and non-technical teammates work at City Hall throughout the weekend. On Sunday evening, every team demos their apps and a panel of judges provides feedback. Seattle Channel will be filming the event and government officials like WA CIO Bharat Shyam and Mayor Mike McGinn, in addition to the city IT department, will be on hand to answer questions and interact with teams. Tickets are available at http://seattlegov.startupweekend.org. There is special student pricing. The ticket includes food, snacks, and drinks throughout the weekend in addition to event swag and unlimited coffee. There is also a FREE event at Seattle City Hall this Thursday, April 19th at 6pm with presentations by Google and Socrata (which powers all the government data sets) on working with their respective APIs. Light refreshments will be served, and there will be time for mingling with some government officials and talking data sets afterwards. Register (free) at http://seattlegovswgtugbootcamp.eventbrite.com/. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to address them or connect you with the right person. Please let me know. If you could pass word along to your students or colleagues who might be interested in attending, I would appreciate it. We are very interested in having students and faculty such as yourself involved in the event if you can make it! Thank you, Marina