Socrata is proud to be hosting the Seattle branch of the 2011 International Open Data Hackathon at our offices in Pioneer Square. For the uninitiated, the International Open Data Hackathon is a loosely-connected event of hackathons in different cities around the world with a common goal of getting as many people around the world hacking on open data at the same time. It’s a great chance for the community to connect around some common goals and build some awesome tech.

The Seattle event will be hosted at Socrata’s offices right in downtown Seattle. We’ve got space for maybe 20-30 developers if we spread out around the office, plently of bandwidth, and a great view of Pioneer Square. My personal goal is to hack on some of the awesome restaurant inspection data provided by Chicago, King County, and the City of New York, but I also welcome people to come work on whatever catches their fancy.

We’ll plan on starting up at about 9AM and sticking around until 6PM, but if people want to keep working later or head out to socialize we’re always game. If you’re interested in attending, please sign up on EventBrite so we know to expect you. That’ll also make sure we have enough refreshments to keep you energized throughout the day!

I’ll also be available on the hackathon IRC channel as “metcalf” if people need help with the Socrata APIs

Socrata is off to Poland! I’ll be representing Socrata at Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw, Poland on October 20th and 21st. If you have any questions about our APIs, our products, or our data, track me down and I’ll be glad to help out.

Something amazing is happening in Chicago. The City of Chicago, Cook County, and State of Illinois all are coming together around the cause of Open Data and are publishing awesome datasets to their collective data sites, and a great developer community is coming together around this influx of new data…

We always like seeing the community pitching in and showcasing how powerful SODA can be when combined with meaningful open data. Today I wanted to highlight Metro Chicago Open Data Examples, written by Stephen Newell…

Update: The rollout of the Publishing Workflow has completed. If you encounter any problems with the new workflow, or if you need help migrating your processes or code, please open a support ticket and we’ll be glad to help you.

Update: The Publishing Workflow rollout has been delayed until 9/20. As before, we’ll provide updates here when the actual deployment has been completed.

Update: The Socrata team will be rolling out the publisher API changes on the evening (Pacific Daylight Time) of Thursday, September 15th. We’ll post another notification when the deployment is complete.

The following is an important announcement for users of the Socrata Open Data Publisher API. If you don’t use the Publisher API to update datasets, it doesn’t pertain to you. But if you’re interested, feel free to read on, because we think it’s pretty cool.

The Socrata team is excited to announce an important update to the Publisher API: The Socrata Publishing Workflow.

Details of the Publishing Workflow have been available for several months, and now that many of our customers have migrated their systems to be prepared for the change, we’re making the final preparations to launch it to our shared production platform.

The Publishing Workflow does change the way that publishers must interact with our platform, so this is an important change to be aware of and prepared for. We plan on rolling out the change during the week of September 12th. Final deployment timing and details will be shared with all publishers before the change is deployed.

For more details, see the documentation on the Publishing Workflow or read on…