Code The City is a civic hacking initiative focused on using tech and (open) data for civic good. We use hack weekends, open data, workshops, and idea generation tools. We run Data Meetups, the Aberdeen Python User Group and the annual Scottish Open Data Unconference
Saturday 10th December from 0900 – 1600 at Bridge of Don Academy, Aberdeen, AB22 8RR
Sport Aberdeen and Code the City are inviting people from across Bridge of Don and the wider Aberdeen area to take part in a full day community workshop looking at active travel ideas. The day will consider ideas to develop an Active Travel Hub in Bridge of Don which can promote and support cycling and walking in the community.
The event will be structured across a whole day, and allowing for drop in attendance throughout the day.
You can choose to drop in either morning or afternoon – or even stay for the full day if you like.
The day will involve:
Identification of potential opportunities or problems relating to the siting and functionality of an active travel hub in the Bridge of Don area.
Group idea generation session to address each of these areas employing a variety of appropriate techniques in order to generate the best ideas possible.
Team and group work to explore each idea – developing these to envision what future states might be.
Iterative development of prototype ‘solutions’.
Catering (teas, coffee, juices, snacks during the morning and afternoon and a sandwich / pizza lunch) for all participants.
Code the City #8, which will take place in on Sat 25th to Sunday 26th February 2017, will be an exploration of the world of chatbots and AI (or Artificial Intelligence), identifying problems to tackle and quickly prototyping solutions.
A chatbot is a piece of software that interacts with a customer or user to directly answer their questions. It uses existing data or information coupled with artificial intelligence to respond in a human-like way, guiding the user to a solution.
There are many examples of live chat bots in this exciting, emerging field. A chatboat could give you travel directions, tell you when its next going to rain in your area, or help you contest parking tickets. It could book you a flight and hotel, or act as a free lawyer to help the homeless get housing . The HBO series Westworld has even launched a bot to help you interact with the (fictional) holiday park!
If you are new to this field and want to get started we suggest you read the Complete Beginners Guide to Chatbots (and some of the links at the end of this article).
Example Travel BotExample Waste Bot
How will the weekend run?
We’ll apply our usual Code The City methodology:
Bring together a diverse range of people from various backgrounds, to form teams.
Identify problems that we’d like to apply chatbots to solve.
Identify approaches, information and data, to guide how we develop the bots and train them
Mix academic thinking, and user need, with open source technology and open data to develop new services
Iterate quickly through approaches, testing ideas, failing quickly and refining our approaches.
Prototype and demonstrate solutions to an interested audience
Who should attend?
Service owners – and service providers
Academics and students in the field of chatbots and artificial intelligence
Coders
Data specialists
Front-end and UX designers
Bloggers and social media practitioners
Anyone with an interest in getting involved in creating bots even for fun!
What you will do?
You will create mixed teams to workshop chatbot solutions to real world issues. Maybe these will building on the outputs of previous work we’ve done at CodeTheCity. Through rapid prototyping you will create new applications and have some fun in the process.
We’ll show you new techniques for service design, idea generation, prototyping, and rapid iterative application development – and you will show other participants some tricks and approaches, too. We’ll share knowledge and learning.
You might even get a Tshirt, and we can guarantee the best catering of any weekend workshop in the city!
To book a free ticket visit our Eventbrite page But be quick, tickets will go swiftly!
All attendees will get a year’s free membership of the Open Data Institute.
You can find out more about the previous events on tumblr, on the eventifier, and on flickr.
So starts another Codethecity conversation on discovering a neat data driven tool. This time it’s the excellent New York subway toy created by Jason Wright.
The tool allows you to redesign transit provision in the city by building new subway routes. By adding new stations. By removing or moving existing lines.
It’s addictive and fascinating.
As is so often the case, we then start riffing on what it could also do. It could time travel using that tram data we have from the early 1900s. It could give alternate route options if we hook up to that academic project we spoke with earlier in the year. It could carbon count. It could give safety information for cyclists. We could data collect with a new app to feed it improved validation data…
Before we have the cake we’re discuss how pretty the icing will look.
In reality what we should be looking at is the bottom layer. The underpinnings. The data.
Where do people live? Where do they work? Where do they school run? Where is the football stadium and where do the fans live? Where are the shops and where is the money?
We’re going to start with the commute. Where do people start, spend, and end their day? How do they move around? And when? No agenda. No grand insights planned. Just a good solid data gathering and modelling project.
We’re calling it journeygrid.
If you have any data, or methodologies for gathering and storing such data we’d love to speak to you.
You can find out more about the New York Subway project here, and you can play with it here.
Code The City 