After two days of intense activity and a whole heap of learning for all of us, Code The City #8, our Chatbots and AI weekend came to an end at tea time on Sunday.
It couldn’t have happened without the generous sponsorship of our two sponsors: The Health Alliance, and Fifth Ring, for which we are very grateful.
The weekend rounded off with presentations of each project, four of which we’ve captured on video (see below).
Each of the projects has its own Github repo. Links are included at the end of each project description. And, two days later, the projects are still being worked on!
Team: ALISS
Team ALISS worked on providing a chatbot interface onto healthcare and social data provided via the ALISS system.
ALISS bot project : Code the City 8 from Andrew Sage on Vimeo.
You can find Project ALISS’s code here on Github.
You can also watch this video of Douglas Maxwell from the Alliance being interviewed about the weekend (although at the time of writing the video is offline due to an AWS problem).
Team: City-consult
This team aimed to make the quality of consultations better through using intelligent chatbot interfaces to guide users through the process – and to provide challenge by prompting citizens to comment on previous consultees’ input.
City-Consult bot project : Code the City 8 from Andrew Sage on Vimeo.
You can find the code for City-Consult at this Github repo.
Team: NoBot
The concept for NoBot came from an initial idea which was of a bot which would make scheduling meetings easier. That spawned the idea – what if the Bot’s purpose was to make you have fewer meetings by challenging you at every turn, and in the process the bot’s personality as a sarcastic gatekeeper was born.
NoBot project : Code the City 8 from Andrew Sage on Vimeo.
The code for Nobot lives here on Github.
Team: Seymour
Sadly there is no video of the wind-up talk for Seymour. In short the purpose of Seymour is to help you keep your houseplants alive. (More details to come).
You can find the code for Seymour at this repo on Github.
Team: Stuff Happens
We started this project with the aim to help citizens find out what was happening in the myriad of local events which we each often seem to miss. Many local authorities have a What’s On calendar, sometimes with an RSS feed. None we found had an API unfortunately.
We identified that by pulling multiple RSS feeds into a single database then putting a bot in front of it, and either through scripting or applying some AI, it should be possible to put potential audiences in touch with what is happening.
Further, by enhancing the collected data – enriching it either manually or by applying machine logic, we could make it more easily navigable and intelligible.
Expect a full write-up of the challenges of this project, and what progress was made, on Ian’s blog,
There is no video, but you an find the project code here on Github.
Team: W[oa]nder
This project set out to solve the problem of checking if a shop or business was still open for the day through a Facebook bot interface – as you with wander around, wondering about the question, as it were.
W[oa]nder bot project : Code the City 8 from Andrew Sage on Vimeo.
You can find their code here.
And finally we were joined by Rory on day two who set out to assist team Stuff-Happens through developing some of the AI around terminologies or categories. That became the:
Word Association Scorer
This is now on Github – not a bot but a set of python functions that scores a given text against a set of categories.
And Finally
We had loads of positive feedback from those who attended the weekend (both old hands and newbies) and from those who watched from afar, following progress on Twitter.
We’ve published the dates for CTC9 and subsequent workshops on our front page. We hope you can join us for more creative fun.
Ian, Andrew, Steve and Bruce
@codethecity
Code The City 