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Here you'll find locally-grown project ideas, with links to local and non-local resources, for awesome civic hacking projects!

For related discussions, join the Hackforwesternmass Google Group
Come to our [HackForWesternMass event]((http://hackforwesternmass.org) in Amherst, on June 1st (the National Day of Civic Hacking!) -- Check out the press release

Project ideas

Hack for Western Mass project ideas are listed [on our website] (http://www.hackforwesternmass.org/challenges).

We're talking about them on our [collaboratively edited HackPad] (https://hackforchange.hackpad.com/HACK-FOR-WESTERN-MASS-1ZyQneaq3Wp), which we share with the other Hack for Change events happening around the country on June 1-2.

Civic Hacking 101 -- from Smart Chicago Collaborative
Random Hacks of Kindness: See solutions built at previous RHoK events. Is there anything that could be re-purposed for Western Massachusetts?
Code for America apps: Code for America has built many open source civic apps.
Civic Tech Patterns: common practices that may help or hinder the conception or design of your civic technology.
Hacking is Good for Democracy: article by Gavin Newsom on Wired
Roll Up Your Sleeves, Get Involved, and Get Civic-Hacking: the White House call to action
Design Resources
Agile Designers: collection of resources on design elements, templates, frameworks, icons, fonts, and many other necessary tools for making web projects.
Noun Project: open source icons
ColorBrewer: planning to color a map? start here!

Data.gov: catalog of data generated by the Federal Government.
American FactFinder: data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Census Bureau APIs: API access to select Census Bureau datasets.
National Priorities Project Data Tools: federal spending and tax resources.
Sunlight Foundation: transparency tools, data, and APIs related to Congressional activities, political contributions, lobbying, and more.
Sunlight Open States (MA): state-level legislative data, also available are bulk downloads, an API, and Python API client.
Massachusetts Open Data Catalog: inventory of Massachusetts state-level data.

D3.js: a JavaScript library for visualizing data. See D3 for mere mortals to get started.
R: An open source statistical programming language and community.
RStudio: A free, open source IDE for R.
Enthought Canopy: Python data analysis and visualization distribution (Express version is free).
Data Visualization Tools: Comprehensive catalog of tools for mapping, charting, and visualizing data.
Flowing Data Tutorials: Step-by-step visualization guides. Many are restricted to Flowing Data members, but some are free to the public, and they are excellent.

Web Scraping for Fun and Profit: A getting-started guide to scraping websites.
ScraperWiki: Web-based platform for building programs to extract (scrape) and analyze data from websites.
OpenRefine: An open source power tool for cleaning up large, messy datasets.

TileMill: An open source design studio from MapBox for making interactive, tiled maps from a variety of data sources (ESRI shapefiles, KML, GeoJSON, CSV, etc.). Integrates with OpenStreetMap.
Azavea Cicero API: Geocodes and matches addresses to legislative districts and elected official contact information. Also includes non-legislative boundaries like school districts, counties, and watersheds. Free trial, and non-profit credits available through TechSoup.
Fusion Table Map Template: Open source template for putting data on a searchable, filterable map. Heroku-ready version also available.
Census 2012 Shapefiles: 2012 extracts containing geographic and cartographic information from the Census Bureau's MAF/TIGER® (Master Address File/Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) database.