BigDataCamp Chicago (April 21, 2012)
Personal notes from BigDataCamp Chicago attended yesterday at Morningstar. The first BigDataCamp Chicago, for which I registrered but could not attend, was held on November 19, 2011. This time around, the title for this event was amended to include "Open Data", to emphasize working with data publicly made available by the government to solve problems in the public sector.
This past week, I already had the chance to browse a number of data stores made available by the City of Chicago and other government entities, mainly because I was looking for big data sets with which to work while ramping up on R Language fundamentals, and so I decided not to attend the sessions specifically focusing on the "Open Data" topic.
It so happens that I found out about this unconference through a nonprofit consulting firm, MCIC, for which I had performed some pro bono consulting work a couple years ago. The company had sponsored a competition this past year to solve public sector problems with open data, and there were connections between that competition and the upcoming Big Data Week this year.