Bath:Hacked 2.1: Using public data for good

Bath:Hacked is a year old, and to celebrate it held its latest public data hack last week as part of the Bath Digital Festival.

Bath: Hacked is a joint council/community initiative that aims to put open data and smart thinking at the heart of the city. It wants to bring bright people and quality data together to do useful things for the community.

Bath:Hacked 2:1 allowed 12 teams to spend 36 hours playing with the local data that the Bath:Hacked team has been gathering for most of this year.

As organiser Richard Spiegal said: “Teams formed, friendships were made, a lot of learning happened and they won £2000 in prizes in the process.”

“Teams formed, friendships were made, a lot of learning happened and they won £2000 in prizes in the process”

 

The winning team put together a ‘Primary School Admissions Data‘ project which used public data to show how easy or hard it was to get a child admitted to different schools in the Bath area. Apart from the obvious usefulness of the project, most notable was the fact the winners had little experience of coding before!

Other notable hacks

Other winning projects created on the day brought Bath’s historic plaques to life with timelined photos, provided an innovative mashup of Instagram photos and food standards ratings so you can see the food you are considering eating, and explained how Bath Council spends its money. See all the latest Bath:Hacked projects.

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The video below, filmed at Bath:hacked 2.1, lets you take a look behind the scenes of what happens at a typical Bath:Hacked event:

Bath:Hacked is to be applauded for its exploration of the possible uses of public data, and despite being only a year old it already has a few successes under its belt:

• A team that formed at Bath:Hacked’s first hack (and won nothing) stayed together and now have funding for a £1m iBeacon project
• Bath has live air quality monitoring, powered not by the council, but by hackers.
• Bath:Hacked brought Bath’s historic maps to life
• Bath residents can now find a toilet.
• Bath residents can now find a parking space.
• 124 local developers have given up time for their community – for free.
• The people of Bath & North East Somerset got an open data store, at a fraction of the cost other regions spend.

“The idea that a completely unfunded, grass roots project could deliver so much real data and tangible value in such a short timeframe is very impressive”

 

As Richard Speigal said: “The idea that a completely unfunded, grass roots project could deliver so much real data and tangible value in such a short timeframe is very impressive.” Long may it continue!

See more about the events coming up at the Bath:Hacked website, see the latest Bath:Hacked projects or follow @BathHacked on Twitter.

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