Manchester City Council

The Manchester Hackathon – 17th November

Calling all hackers, coders and creative collaborators – Manchester needs you to shape the future of the digital city.

For the first time ever, the City of Manchester invites you to dig underneath its digital skin. FutureEverything, Open Data Manchester and Manchester City Council are looking for experts and innovators to hack, code, programme and experiment with the city’s sets of open data to build new applications and develop future services.

Utilising the open data sets from DataGM made available by Manchester City Council and public sector partners, participants are welcome to produce anything they wish – develop applications to help people find their way around, stay safe, discover new experiences and everything and anything in between. All data is released under the Open Government Licence.

Taking place at MadLab in the heart of Manchester’s Northern Quarter on Saturday 17th November, the Manchester Hackathon is set to be an intense, productive and exciting collaboration between the brightest minds in software development and data processing. Entries from both teams and individuals are welcome, and there are cash prizes to be won for the best product at the end of the session, including;

Grand Prize – £4,600*
Best Under 21’s Creation – £600
Best Visualisation – £600
Best Locative Application – £600
Developer’s Prize – £600
Best Solution for an Identified Problem – £600

* £1000 prize & £3,600 development funding

The event is completely free to enter and open to all. Register HERE

The prizes will be selected by a panel of independent industry experts, including Dave Carter (MDDA) and Lou Cordwell (magneticNorth).

The Hackathon takes place on Saturday 17th November 9am – 7pm, with a warmup and networking session beforehand at MDDA (Lower Ground Floor, 117-119 Portland St, Manchester, M1 6ED) on Friday 16th November 6.30 – 8.30pm

The Manchester Hackathon is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community.

ODM – September 2012 Edition

6.30pm – 8.30pm, Tuesday 25th September
Venue: MDDA, 117-119 Portland Street, Manchester M1 6ED

Sign up on Eventbrite

After a brief summer hiatus Open Data Manchester is back and temporarily at a different venue.
The last event saw James Cattell from Digital Birmingham, Andrew MacKenzie from the UK Governments Open Data User Group and Jag Goraya from GIST Foundation in Sheffield talking about how open data initiatives were developing in Birmingham and Sheffield and Birmingham City Council’s adoption of a corporate open data strategy.

Since the last meeting there has been quite a bit of activity mostly around some forthcoming hackdays and support for open data initiatives in Manchester. Last Tuesday we had the launch of Tech Hub Manchester in Carver’s Warehouse on Dale Street, Manchester. This is going to be a new co-working space networked into Tech Hub London and a wider international digital start-up community and we will be having the Tech Hub people coming to talk about the initiative and Start-up Weekend a two day hack event utilising open data.

The City of Manchester is also looking at developing open data as far as part of a new Technology Strategy Board – Future Cities Demonstrator project. This is a large £24 million fund that will help the creation of digital services within the city. Anne Dornan who is working on the project will explain how open data fits into this.

If you are interested in public transport, and a lot of people are, Move*Manchester is an Innovation Challenge that will be running in March 2013. The planning is being finalised, but it will entail a weekend event based around a hackathon that will lead to product development and support. The prize fund and support package to develop products and services will be approximately £35,000 and is part of the CitySDK programme run by FutureEverything and Manchester City Council with the support of Open Data Manchester. More details to follow.

Also we will be looking at the latest data releases on DataGM, TfGM, cool developments and anything else people want to show

Open Data Manchester March meeting

March’s meeting was an opportunity to help shape Manchester City Council’s forthcoming open data Hackathon. Stuart Baldwin – an ODM regular – spoke about Manchester’s plans for an event in October to coincide with the Manchester Science Festival.

The driver behind this is the recently announced Manchester Digital Strategy and a recent trip that Chief Executive of MCC, Sir Howard Bernstein made to New York. Whilst a guest of Mayor Bloomberg, Sir Howard was apparently impressed with what New York was doing with their open data initiatives such as 311 and App Challenges.

Open Data Manchester and MDDA advised MCC, that for a Hackathon to work it needed to work with the developer community to make the event relevant and developer friendly.

The conversation was mainly focussed on the types of data that developers wanted releasing and there is a list from Duncun Hull @dullhunk here

What was notable was the willingness to listen to what the community wanted and by suggestions from MCC itself, such as Contaminated Land data which has traditionally been contentious.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/36540620 w=400&h=300]
Visualisation by Jonathan Fisher more details here

After the Hackathon discussion attention focussed on Road Traffic Collision data and the work that Steven Flower, Jonathan Fisher and Jonathan S. – There has been discussion about forming a sub-group around RTC data and its use. So if people want to get involved in that contact Steven Flower on the Google Group. Jonathan Fisher’s visualisations where discussed and also the variation in data quality that exists. It was noted that although data was provided to TfGM who collated the data for the Department of Transport. Different flavours of the data existed in different places. TfGM upload monthly data to DataGM which lacked detail on casualties and vehicles involved. The complete RTC data gets forwarded it to the DfT who then make it available via the DfT website and and data.gov.uk with more detail but in two different versions. We are trying to find out why DataGM only holds a less detailed version.