Michael Maciag’s walk-through of this under-utilized goldmine.

A La Nación hackathon to enhance the open-source file-freeing tool behind VozData results in a better CrowData and a tall list of changes to come.

Events in New York, Bogotá, and London, plus the deadline for the next OpenNews code convening.

Twitter’s data editor lays out the major challenges and opportunities that arise when you set out to map tweets.

Time’s Chris Wilson and Pratheek Rebala open up the enormous Open Payments dataset from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services using flat files and Ajax.

Hacks/Hackers are meeting up in four countries this week, plus applications are open to participate in a hackathon at Al Jazeera.

Christopher Groskopf, master of CSVs, breaks down the magical powers of csvkit.

Emily Alpert Reyes on how to find promising needles in Census haystacks.

Conferences in Japan and Mexico, plus meetups in New York and Vienna.

Lena Groeger on the magical powers of every little thing.

The California Civic Data Coalition issues a challenge.

Launching with two new Django applications ready made to make California campaign finance data easier to access.

POV’s Brian Chirls on why video sync is a giant pain and how to make it work.

Web journalism lovers descend on Chicago this year for the Online News Association annual conference.

Jake Harris reverse-engineers Twee-Q to evaluate its use of data (and see if his ratio is as disappointing as Twee-Q says it is)

Hacks/Hackers meeting up in Europe, and geography nerds in Portland, OR this week.

Basile Simon walks through the process of building a new tool that aims to help reporters cover beats, and that was prompted by work by Knight-Mozilla Fellows and a presentation at Hacks/Hackers London.

Robert Gebeloff’s primer on working microdata magic

Meetups this week and hackathons in Buenos Aires and São Paulo.