Napoleon famously said “An army marches on its stomach.”  When it comes to Gov 2.0-style bar camps and hack days like Code for Oakland, the saying could be ” The coders ride on the data.”

That said, one of the biggest and most exciting collaborative efforts of planning Code for Oakland was pulling a team together to make sure coders and developers had some idea of what data sources would be available for CFO attendees to us.  This data catalog, a meta-list of data from city, county, state, and national sources, would  be a starting point to access, research and download data to use in the apps people would build.

Only catch?  Well, not only didn’t we have a data catalog, in the case of the City of Oakland, we started with very little publicly available data.  However, over the past six weeks, thanks to the hard work of people on the data team for CFO-Steve Spiker and John Harvey from Urban Strategies Council, Michal Migurski from Stamen Design, Anca Moiscu from Tech Liminal,  Nicole Neditch from the City of Oakland, plus aid from Paul Richardson and Sian Morison, data has been identified, people have been mobilized, and all sorts of new data sets are going online and becoming available.

So, we’re heading into Code for Oakland, one week away, with a much fuller catalog of APIs, GIS files, CSV files and plain old Excel spreadsheets.  Many people across Oakland and beyond have pulled the data together, and there’s a strong interest in taking this early catalog and continuing it-and creating a server space where all of you who find and create data sets you would like to share, can upload and host them (talk to Anca and John Harvey about that).

Links to the data sets are on the data page-if you have data to add, please let us know ([email protected])

DATASF: help us by suggesting other data sets to look for!