FRONTYARD Summer School
A Frontyard team will be conducting planning sessions for a new summer school.
Topic ideas, loose list, please add more :)
- Alternative housing models for Sydney
- cooperatives
- renters rights
- investigating local development
How to's
- using decentralised web tools (maybe specific one, or specific scenario?)
- privacy tools, password managers
- web scraping
- working with data, spreadsheets
- bulk cooking
- low energy/cost ways to keep your apartment/room/house cool in summer/heat waves
Sessions / Schedule, November 2018
Monday, 19th Nov
6pm - 8pm - What is Web Scraping? How does it work? When is it useful?
Web scraping is a really handy way to collect lots of data off the web. Ever need to check the same website again and again to check if something’s changed? Need to collect lots of ephemeral documents? Want to create a little software to do that manual, repetitive labour so you can do something more interesting? Web scraping can help. Web scraping is the basis of most activist software projects and plays an increasingly important role in activism as more government information goes online.
This is an open presentation to explain what web scraping is, when it's useful and when it's not.
This presentation is for activists, designers, researchers, artists and anyone who works with information online, and will be followed by a hands on workshop on Tuesday for those who want to learn the practice themselves. Even if that's not for you, it's great to know what's possible so that you can collaborate with someone who does want to do some scraping in the future.
Luke has done lots of web scraping, to collect development applications from councils, find out who's profiting from WestConnex, collect and archive pollution monitoring data, and more.
Tuesday, 20th Nov
5pm - 8:30pm - Hands on introduction to web scraping workshop (6 spots left)
Following Monday night’s presentation, this workshop is for those who'd like to learn how to write a web scraper themselves. It's a great introduction to programming, so if you've interested in learning some
You will write your own web scraper using the Ruby programming language, to collect data from the web.
This workshop is limited to 8 spots, please RSVP to Luke Bacon at luke@equivalentideas.com , or on the Frontyard Slack.
What to bring: a laptop, note book, something to snack on.
Notes:
- Step by step tutorial to set up your laptop and write a scraper https://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2015/10/13/ruby-web-scraping-tutorial-on-morph-io-part-1/
- Helpful resources for web scraping in Ruby https://gist.github.com/equivalentideas/670481f8b4b2d892e1a6
