The upcoming Upcounty Open Data Town Hall will be held at the Upcounty Regional Services Center in Germantown on January 28th from 7-8:30 pm. The first Open Data Town Hall was very successful and gathered insight from Montgomery County residents on the application of Open Data in the county. However, the second Open Data Town Hall will have a slightly broader audience: Montgomery County high school students.
The Innovation Program has been reaching out to Upcounty high schools to get them involved and allow the students to apply what they learn in school. Targeted students include those enrolled in AP Government and technology classes to look at the two sides of Open Data. The government students will explore how Open Data is crucial to an open government, where the datasets are readily available, accessible, and timely on a portal such as dataMontgomery. The technology students will be able to further understand the use of this portal and why citizens would find it useful. Chief Innovation Officer Dan Hoffman has been visiting the schools to speak to these students about the importance in Open Data as well as Montgomery County’s work in the field.
Receiving input from a younger audience will broaden or perspective on the data, especially its applications. Hearing the ideas of high schoolers will allow the Innovation Program to determine the most effective datasets for people of all ages. These suggestions will then be carried out to dataMontgomery. High schoolers may be more interested in seeing how the datasets can affect the high schools of Montgomery County.
Join us on January 28th for the second Open Data Town Hall, and stay tuned for the results and a recap of the event. If you’d like to participate and suggest a dataset via Twitter or Facebook, please use the hashtag #opendataMC.