Freebase Hack Day, November 8th in San Francisco

I’ll be attending the inaugurual Freebase Hack Day on November 8th. In fact, I’m organising it.

It’s going to be a pretty interesting event. We’ve been working on a bunch of new things, including a hosted server-side Javascript app platform, called Acre, for easily building apps and mashups based on Freebase data.

If the previous paragraph made your eyes glaze over, think of an enormous database of EVERYTHING, and the ability to mash it up with Google Maps, mainstream news sources like the New York Times, Wikipedia, Netflix, or just about any other data source. Plus, the tools for doing this are social, so you can borrow and share code and get started really quickly. I’ve built a couple of Acre apps already, and Javascript’s *so* not my language, but despite that I’m actually enjoying it.

As well as the Acre stuff, we’ll have a bunch of data geeks on hand, and our theme for the event is Open Government. With the Hack Day happening just days after the US elections, I’m hoping we’ll get some interesting visualisations or other apps out of it.

The event’s free, of course, and there’ll be lunch and tshirts and all those sorts of goodies. If you’re in San Francisco or want to travel to SF, and have been wondering what I’ve been up to, you should go sign up.

See you there!