Steve Milne

Call for new trustees

To complement our current skill base, and support our ambitious plans for 2020, we are looking to recruit two additional trustees to join Code The City.

About Code the City

Code The City is an Aberdeen based charity. We believe that putting technology, design, and data skills in the hands of the community can improve the quality of life for the individual, and the community as a whole. Introducing people with challenges to new skills, and introducing people with skills to new challenges is at the heart of what we do.

Our mission is to help people learn, use, and apply technology and data skills for civic good.

We are a small, focused charity primarily delivering public events and training programs. 2019 was a pivotal year for Code the City, moving from a quarterly event program to a near weekly program. We added new events and started serving new local audiences – including local young coders. We also extended the reach of our important open data work to a national level.

What will you be doing?

Trustees do not have to take on any specific responsibilities. Each year, we elect a Chair and Treasurer. We also ask any willing Trustees to do some specific jobs, these change over time to meet current needs.

At present, we have 3 Trustees – we aim for no more than 5 during 2020.

We have a detailed plan for the year ahead. We meet quarterly for an evening board meeting (2 – 3 hours), and monthly for a breakfast meeting (~1hour, optional). Additionally it would be natural, although not essential, to attend some of our growing programme of events in some capacity.

What are we looking for?

We would really welcome people with enthusiasm for the community benefits that technology and data can bring. We are particularly keen to strengthen our collective background in charity operation, fundraising, and organisational collaboration.

Technical coding and data skills are far from essential, although some enthusiasm for the transformative power of digital and data would be useful.

What difference will you make?

We welcome applications from individuals who are able to use their knowledge and experience to help lead this rapidly developing organisation. Without Trustees the charity is unable to function – we need and depend on the generosity of those with relevant experiences and skills to join our team.

The potential impact of projects born at our events is significant. Our aim is to improve the lives of people in the city. You can help us deliver this work.

What’s in it for the volunteer?

The role, although unpaid, is a very fulfilling one which provides an opportunity to make a difference to individuals engaged in our programs, and to the wider community. It provides an opportunity to collectively share experience and expertise with others in a welcoming environment.

Our Trustees are valued and respected team members – come and join us!

How to apply

The person dealing with recruitment is Steve Milne, please make contact with Steve at steve@codethecity.org.

When data glitches ruin your day

The Scotrail service between Aberdeen and Inverness is currently disrupted by some improvement works to the line between Aberdeen and Dyce. Bus replacement services are in operation between Aberdeen and Dyce, with normal service between Dyce and Inverness. All because the line has been dug up in preparation for new dual tracks being laid.

But if you do a search on the Scotrail website for the next train north from Aberdeen you get this message:

“No services between these stations have been found”. One would assume that Scotrail isn’t running services from Aberdeen to Insch. The same thing happens for searches to all stations north of Aberdeen. Continue reading When data glitches ruin your day

Cantcha @ codethecity 13

During Codethecity 13, a project arose around the clarity of labelling of alcohol, initiated following a presentation from @wayne_gault about alcohol labelling and marketing.

Quickly the focus of discussion moved to craft beer, and the rising importance of graphic design in the branding and positioning of the various craft breweries, often using cartoon and other colourful illustrative styles. In a competitive market with many new entrants it’s no surprise that some corners are being cut. Sometimes through a lack of awareness of the issue, sometimes not so much.

Sending one particularly colourful can to the Google Vision API was telling. Google identified it as a “Yellow, Aluminium Can, of Soft Drink”. You can try the vision API yourself here.

The team working on this issue came up with the idea of creating a new version of reCaptcha. Rather than clicking on all the store fronts, or vehicles, you would click on all the beers, or all the energy drinks.

This would both raise awareness of the issue, and provide a data set to demonstrate the level of confusion around specific labels. If the ‘spongebob’ beer in the mockup below is regularly identified as an energy drink, perhaps the labelling falls short of the standard.

How this could be useful

The Portman Group publishes the Code of Practice for the naming, packaging and promotion of alcoholic drinks. An ultimate goal of the CANtcha team was to use data generated from the app to add weight to submissions to the Portman Group where packaging falls short of the Code.

Some early (and far from rigorous given the timescales) testing showed that enough of the alcohol was being misidentified that an issue likely exists.

Code for the mock ups, some initial data sets, and some initial analysis are available on Github. A more technical write up is also available.

Even though this was a very brief, short lived prototype – I’ll never look at a beer in the same way again

I subscribe to a craft beer delivery service. It sends me a case every now and then with enough interesting beer from around the world to keep my ‘bottle of hipster a week’ habit going.

A case just arrived.

Now that I’m aware of the Portman rules, I couldn’t help wonder what CANtcha would make of a couple of them:

I suspect both of these might fall short on one or more counts. I also love both of them. The Google API mentioned above identifies one as beer, and the other as an energy drink. It’s likely obvious which is which.

Neither is identified as a can of coffee, surprisingly.

Volunteer with us

At Code The City we are always looking for opportunities to work with volunteers.

We recognise that this not only helps us to delivery on our charity’s aims, but also helps the volunteers themselves.

We’ve just published an overview of the opportunities, with a new volunteer form, and mention of the upcoming ‘I volunteered at Codethecity’ t-shirts. Guaranteed to be the must have fashion item of 2018.

So if you’d like to help us at upcoming hack weekends, please check out that page and fill out the form.

Code the City 12 – Tourism

The Challenge

Tourism is vital to the local economy. While loads of tourists pass through Aberdeen we could do so much more to make it a destination of choice.

The featured image above is how we used to attract tourists to Aberdeen. How should we do it now? What role does design, marketing, technology or data play in new interactions with tourists?

Who should attend?

Anyone – despite our name, coding is a small bit of what we do.

Of course, coders, data wranglers, designers and other techies are important to a hack weekend.

We’d be delighted to see you if:

You work in the tourism sector, operating attractions, providing accomodation or other services
You have identified a problem with service delivery, or see an opportunity to do things better!
You have an interesting in service design
You work or study in the creative industries
You have experience as a tourist in Aberdeen or anywhere else
You are someone who wants to do more with data but isn’t sure where to start
You are a student (of any discipline)
You are someone who wants to improve the local area, or use digital and skills to improve local services
You are from the third sector or local government
You work with mapping, GIS, or location data
You are curious about learning new techniques and skills to use in your day job, and finally
And, of course, if you are a developer, designer, UX expert, data wrangler, coders, or service designer

So it’s a Toursim hack?

Yes – we’ll be identifying opportunities and barriers to making Aberdeen City and Shire a destination of choice for tourists, creating projects, teams and prototypes to address those. Some of those will turn into coding projects – and some will all be about research, service design and paper prototyping.

Timings

The event will run Saturday 9.30am to about 5pm, then Sunday 9.30 to about 4.30pm.

What happens over the weekend?

* identification of opportunities and barriers

* ideation to address those

* creation of project teams to work on those

* agile prototyping of solutions, so that by close of play Sunday we will have demonstrable solutions which could be developed into real worls products or services.

But, a ticket will cost £5 (*)

What do you mean, it’s not free? CTC is usually free!

At CTC 11 in December we broke with a tradition established over the previous 10 events and charged a small amount to attend. The reasone was that in a couple of recent CTC events we had higher than normal numbers of people booking free tickets and not showing up. That meant we over-catered, and despite our best efforts we had left-over food, which is a bad thing and wastes money too.

So, we attached a monetary value to the ticket (* backed up by our promise that those attending would get their money back when they showed up). And it worked. The bookings didn’t go down. Fewer people dropped out. We didn’t waste food and we banked the money that went unclaimed. A few generous individuals recognising our new charity status even refused their money back, which was nice.

Tickets

You can get tickets here (on Eventbrite).

Location & Getting There

We’ll be at the Sir Ian Wood Building at Robert Gordon University’s Garthdee Campus. You can get a No 1 bus from King Street / Union Street which will take you into the campus and drop you at the door. Or you can get a No. 2 bus which will drop you at the gates to the campus.

If you must drive, then parking is free and open at weekends on campus.

Sponsorship

Robert Gordon University will be sponsoring this event. We could do with another sponosor or two to make sure we cover all costs. If you would like to sponsor it, get in touch with @codethecity on Twitter.

We look forward to seeing you in February!

Ian, Steve, Andrew and Bruce.

Code the City

Registered Charity in Scotland: SC047835