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"Government agencies will challenge thousands of programmers across the country to solve community problems with open data and lines of code this weekend during the first-ever National Day of Civic Hacking. \nThe National Day of Civic Hacking will bring 6,000 coders and entrepreneurs together with representatives from dozens of government agencies in nearly 100 different cities. The goal? Government representatives will challenge coders to solve community problems with their open data and expert assistance.\n\"The idea that we had was to bring together a critical mass to make this thing happen,\" said Todd Khozein, partner at SecondMuse, which is leading the National Day of Civic Hacking with support or involvement from many other organizations, including Intel, NASA and the Census Bureau. \n\"We'll bring together a number of federal agencies as well as a large number of communities \u2014 really across the country, bring in the critical mass. And we hope interesting, valuable solutions will emerge from the community that's passionate about creating them.\"\nChief Technology Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Bryan Sivak told Mashable that the National Day of Civic Hacking challenges are centered around four goals that they think are \"important to move the ball forward\" \u2014 liberating data, generally understanding data, specifically understanding data and improving the openness of data. \nSivak pointed to the hospital charge data recently released by the HHS as an example of what he hopes coders can achieve with datasets. Reporters jumped on the hospital information, writing stories exposing vast differences in costs among nearby hospitals. Sivak, however, says there's more yet to be done.\n\"One of the things we're putting out there is a challenge around that dataset to say, 'Can you visualize this data in a new and interesting way that will shed some light on what the prices are, or some other aspect of how those prices relate to the healthcare system,'\" Sivak explained.\nSEE ALSO: Citizinvestor Helps Grab The Ears of Local Governments\n\nA number of civic-minded startups have cropped up in recent years, from Citizinvestor to TurboVote. (Citizenvestor will be taking part in the Tampa, Florida event this weekend.) Sivak argued the National Day of Civic Hacking's popularity is further evidence programmers want to apply their skills to solving neighborhood problems.\n\"I'm a programmer by training, so I think I can say this with some personal knowledge \u2014 people who write code like to solve problems. And generally speaking, they like to solve problems that are meaningful and have some significant effect at the end of them,\" said Sivak. \n\"You can either spend your time as a coder writing something that optimizes ad clicks or something like that, or you can spend your time solving something that actually has some significant impact on the community you live in, or the state you live in or the country you live in or some massive process that effects a whole ton of people.\"\nShould more coders get involved with \"civic hacking\"? Share your thoughts in the comments.\nImage via Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/05/29/national-day-civic-hacking/>