SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

As coding and developing becomes more and more popular, hacakthons are becoming an innovative way to create solutions to every day problems. A hackathon (a mix of the words 'hack' and 'marathon') is when programmers and software developers gather together to collaboratively code over a very short period of time, typically a quick as a day or as long as a week. The main goal of a hackathon is to create usable software, apps, and sometimes hardware  In 2011, US Congress hosted it's first hackathon on December 7 at the Capitol Visitors Center. The event showed how political leadership agrees on the importance and power of technology when mixed with open data. Most of the time, this results in cool and useful apps and resources for residents. These civic hackathons are becoming more popular, popping up all over the US and happening more and more often.  Cities are beginning  to host their very own hacakthons where local residents use public city data to solve iss

The National Institute of Justice has recently announced new funding opportunities for research . If you are planning on applying for NIJ funding for research please remember that SpotCrime has free data for research and plans to release more data in 2013. We are committed to release and share public crime data for positive purposes. We made our historical database available earlier this year in hopes that crime patterns apparent in the data would be analyzed and new methods of crime prevention would arise from the findings. Some of the research the NIJ will be funding sounds pretty interesting. One program will provide funding for analysis of existing data the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data. Another program will provide funding to the Ph.D. Graduate Research Fellowship for research on crime, violence, and other criminal just related topics.It would be interesting to see what researchers find from their analysis of that data, especially at the Ph.D. level - it would also b