I am happy to announce Splunk4Good is formally partnering with Geeks Without Bounds (GWOB) in 2013! The partnership will lend broad support to GWOB’s mission and encourage the use of Splunk products in humanitarian projects.

GWOB is a non-profit organization with a mission to apply technology as an accelerator for humanitarian projects. In order to achieve this mission GWOB hosts humanitarian hackathons around the globe and also works with humanitarian startups in an accelerator program with 2 cohorts per year.

Read a bit more about GWOB in the words of their Executive Director, Willow Brugh, (and click thru to read their full Theory of Change):

Geeks Without Bounds works towards positive change by bridging the gap between technological

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Yesterday marked an important next step in San Francisco’s Open Data journey.

Back in October, through cooperation with President David Chiu’s office, Mayor Lee’s new Office of Civic Innovation submitted a revised Open Data ordinance to the Board of Supervisors.

This legislation was scheduled for review yesterday, Thursday, March 28th at 10:00am, before the Government Audit and Oversight Committee. The proposed legislation would allow the City to appoint a new Chief Data Officer (CDO) and would compliment the CDO position with department-level Data Coordinators throughout the city.

Jay Nath, the City’s Chief Innovation Officer who has been  leading this effort, in addressing the Supervisors Thursday described open data as “Machine readable raw…

On March 6, 2013 after SplunkLive in Philadelphia, developers joined forces with Splunkers for a Hackathon at Seed Philly. Despite the weather that we were having in Philly, everyone did a great job on using Splunk and interesting data to create an innovative apps!

Jonathan Luste, Marquise Lee, Alem Abreha, Patrick Shumate, Sean Brown {team name: “Team Comcast”, spirit animal: “Mongoose”} won 1st place for Best App!  Bringing their creative minds together they Splunked Philadelphia Crime data to see violent vs non-violent crimes and incident rates that are displayed on the maps. Check out the pic of the team presenting and a couple screenshots of the app!

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On your mark! Get set! Hack! Splunk is hosting a hackathon at Seed Philly on Wednesday, March 6 from 4-9pm, after SplunkLive Philadelphia.  This hackathon gives developers a chance to build applications that make it easier and more effective to gain insights from machine data with Splunk.

Have you heard of Splunk, but don’t know how to get started using the product to build cool data mashups? Come and join! Splunk will provide food, beer and Splunk experts to help you get started. All skill levels are welcome. Join us whether you are a black belt Splunk ninjas or new to Splunk and wanting to apply your coding skills to build data apps.

Thanks much to Seed Philly…

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Splunk4Good’s new intern, Carol Silva, told you recently how excited we were to be sponsoring and hosting StudentRND‘s 1st Code Day SF here at Splunk HQ over President’s Day weekend. I knew it was going to be great, but I had to blog myself to share how absolutely wowed I was at the epic success of this event!

Saturday morning as Tyler Menezes and Chris Engelbrecht from StudentRND finished setting up, the first few kids starting filtering into the Splunk Dev space, all with laptops and some with fancy gaming accessories or sleeping bags in hand. I had my first indicator things were going to be epic when before the keynote even began there was…

I am happy to announce that Splunk4Good will be hosting and sponsoring StudentRND’s first CodeDay event in San Francisco!  It is going to be held on Feb. 16-17. This is creating not only a great partnership with StundentRND, but will provide Bay Area youth with an awesome experience.  CodeDay is a 24 hour “hackathon” style event aimed at getting youth, 14-22 yrs. old, involved in creating innovative apps and games while inspiring them to become future entrepreneurs.

CodeDay consists of programing, eating, prizes and giveaways. It is a great, party-like atmosphere where you can expect to be surrounded by awesomeness! The youth that attend are broken up into groups of 3-6 people in which they have…

Splunk4Good has landed in Washington DC!

I am honored and excited to share the news that I will be speaking on behalf of Splunk4Good at the White House this Wednesday, February 6th at noon EST. That’s right people! Splunk4Good is on the agenda at the FEMA Think Tank meeting on Innovative Solutions in Emergency Management.

Did you know that immediately after Hurricane Sandy made landfall last fall, FEMA deployed an Innovation Team? How cool is that!

In his recent blog post Deputy Administrator Rich Serino described the team:

“Innovation Team– a multi-sector, cross functional group made up of people in government, non-profit and international organizations, volunteer groups, businesses, and concerned citizens: the whole community.  At the most basic

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Last year, I put out a Java version of a RSS Input program that was based on included open source to parse RSS. It used the beta version of the Splunk Java SDK to check for duplicates to make sure in a reasonable time period the same RSS link wasn’t already indexed into Splunk. With the GA release of the Splunk Java SDK, I updated the contents on Splunkbase to include the GA Splunk Java SDK jar file and also used a more efficient way to check for a duplicate entry. You can download the distribution on Splunkbase.

To recap, the distribution uses a scripted input to index the contents of configurable RSS feeds every configurable N seconds. You…

I have a college friend who after years of working in the IT field decided to become an 8th grade math teacher. This is a noble endeavor. After hearing this, I began to think about what it was like to learn math in my own youth and quickly thought about the usual word problems such as when will two trains intersect if heading at certain speeds at each other or finding the X value given an equation. These type of problem solving skills probably meet the needs of most students, but some want more. In fact, they want their math problems to apply to real world scenarios to make them more realistic and interesting.

This is where Splunk can play…