Open Data, meet Oakland.

If you're an Oakland based coder, developer, designer, journo, researcher and you want to help build the first Oakland OpenData portal then please join us next weekend (Feb 25th @10am).  We are partnering with the alpha event of the Code for America Brigade for the first Code Across America day and will spend the day laying out the plans for this new resource for Oaktown.

We want your ideas, feedback, critique, concepts and creative spirit to help us make this work for everyone in Oakland. In mid/late March we will host a hack day in Oakland to do the dev work and get the site up and running, but the planning phase is just as important. We want to brainstorm with you on how we deal with the City/County split, which system we adopt- either the OpenDataPhily or the CKAN system, how it's hosted and who will contribute to maintaining it, branding and promotion and more. We don't want to do this in isolation so here's your chance to help make this happen and to make sure your voice is heard.

We're not about to reinvent the wheel, so we'll be Skyping in with some of the crew from Chattanooga who recently stood up the Phily platform in their town, we'll learn from their process and then work from there. We already have a huge data warehouse of Oakland and Alameda data and we will be publishing it aggressively to whatever site we launch. The city and county are both interested in this happening but have yet to take the lead, so we're doing a Phily and just doing it ourselves. With your help! So register now!

Keep in touch: follow @openoakland and @infoalameda for news and data releases!

Hashtag: #cfa2012 for the day's events.