This weekend a number of the Tropo crew have descended upon Seattle for Gnomedex and Seattle Geek Week. We’re hosting the final geek week event, Gnomedex’s Tinkerstorm: an open government themed hackathon.

A group of developers will descend upon the Edgewater Hotel right next to the Gnomedex venue and build apps to help our fellow citizens. Socrata will be there with a bunch of government APIs and data sets for you to work with and Seattle’s CTO Bill Schrier will be stopping by to talk about open government from the perspective of the government. Amazon’s bringing a stack of AWS credit to help you with a place to host your apps. We’ve got a few people on hand to help you understand Tropo and create some great apps with these platforms.

We’re kicking off at 5pm on Saturday and running 24 hours straight. Dinner on Saturday, and breakfast and lunch on Sunday are being provided, as is plenty of coffee all night long. We’ve even got a cash bar running for a bit each evening. And we’ve got some great wifi provided by Meraki.

Why should you do this? Beyond the challenge of building apps that will improve the lives of all around you, we’re also handing out prizes. Want an iPad, a Flip HD, or a year of Animoto Pro? Sunday afternoon, everyone will present their apps and at 5pm on Sunday, the top apps will get some prizes.

Tropo has a number of customers who are building apps for government applications, so we’re excited to be able to be part of this. Heck, even some of our sample apps are themed around opengov or use government data, like our BART eta checker, weather forecasts, or our traffic alerts.

You don’t have to be attending Gnomedex to come to the hackathon. Go sign up (it’s free) and come by and help out. Not in Seattle but still want to participate? We’ve got an IRC channel (#tinkerstorm on Freenode) and a Google Group.