Richard and I were thinking, the hardest part of open data mashups is getting started: namely finding and choosing which datasets you're going to use.

We already had a list of resources for the Open Data Mashup Summer Jam Hackathon, but it wasn't inclusive or easy enough to sort through.

So, we decided to make a little app that creates a random list of datasets, based on categories you're interested in.

Demo GIF

  • Last night I compiled a big json file of data sets compiled from data.gov, our title sponsor Socrata's Open Data Portal, the Awesome Public Datasets repo on GitHub, and the World Bank.

  • Next, I used the Louis Cuny's multi-select jQuery plugin to create a cool data picker widget and wrote some JavaScript to randomly pick a dataset for each selected category.

That's it really, but I got a lot of help from Stack Overflow and this CSS button tutorial on CodePen.

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