In what's believed to be the first event of its type, Manchester hosted an event for web developers which saw them set about data sets held by some of the city's main institutions to work up new ways to deliver services. Sarah Hartley went along to the Manchester Hackathon
Bus timetables and public toilet maps might not sound like reasons to get out of bed on a weekend morning but, as the text on the goody bags and posters for this event reminded everyone - Manchester does thing differently.
Packing into the city's MadLab in the northern quarter, well out of sight of the grandeur of the town hall, the city's developer community took the challenge to "hack, code, programme and experiment with the city's sets of open data to build new applications and develop future services."
Although just 24 intense hours long, this focussed event was actually the outcome of many months, if not years, of campaigning, cajoling and collaborating by open data campaigners from FutureEverything and Open Data Manchester to build relationships with the city council and other organisations.
The lead councillor for IT at the council, Nigel Murphy was there among the hackers and explained why in these times of cuts and pressure the authority was reaching out in this way.
"By making data formats available there's going to be a cost to get that there but if someone asks for that information under freedom of information, there's going to be a cost for that there anyway so maybe by spending 10 or 15 percent to make sure it's a set format and we publish what that format is, it could save more requests in the future.
"The important thing is making sure that information is there for the public, it's their data at the end of the day so we need to make sure its available for people to use to make the apps or computer programmes for the future so that we can make it better for the citizens of Manchester."
You can hear the full interview via the link above.
As well as some cash and support for the winnning ideas, the big prize was getting hold of the data sets themselves. The full list has now been made available to the wider public at Manchester Digital Development Agency's website here.
It includes city council information such as council tax bands, grit bin locations, contaminated land as well as visitor attractions details from Marketing Manchester and collections information Manchester Museum's Ancient Worlds Exhibition.
The Hackathon day concluded with a quick-fire presentation before the judges selected a project called Data Crossfader from Ashleigh Herriott and James Rutherford of Creative Nucleus as the winner.
The developer prize went to SatLav, an app to find the nearest public toilet and details about it such as opening times etc.
Cameras from the BBC Click programme were also filming on the day so a future programme could also feature this initaitive.
* The picture gallery from the event on this page was curated by Sarah Hartley using the open journalism toolkit n0tice.org app HashGordon.
Manchester
Data visualisations
Sarah Hartley
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