Team #MatchTheCity are creating the back-end to support projects like the #ActiveAberdeen and #BigSociety team projects. The end result should allow you to match things together – allowing people to match with events, sports or volunteering opportunities, based on particular criteria, perhaps a set of certain skills, including soft skills.
An example of a volunteer match would be that a community service needed someone to answer a telephone helpline, they could have a requirement for people to have empathy and an excellent telephone manner, and people seeking volunteer work with those attributes would be matched with that opportunity.
As I write this, the team had been scraping and also transcribing data from existing websites, for example the SportAberdeen timetable and the timetable for the new Aquatics Centre, to be used for this purpose.
A challenge the team have been facing with this project is that the data they need is not open data. It is designed for human reading, often cannot be machine-read and is effectively single-use. This precludes it from being presented in a different way, for example, it currently could not feed directly into an app for a smartphone.
Update (11:19am): #MatchTheCity have expanded their data model to include new functionality. You can see this team’s output at CodeTheCity’s GitHub.
#MatchTheCity are David, a Code for Europe fellow at East Lothian Council; Ian, the e-government manager at Aberdeen City Council; and Andrew, a Code for Europe fellow at Edinburgh City Council.
Code The City 