Code The City 22 – The Environment

This event took place on 20th and 21st March. Due to the continuing pandemic lockdown, it was held entirely online.

While the turnout was lower than for many previous physical hack weekends, this one was extremely focused: with three teams forming to work on projects right from the outset. We also benefitted from two of the projects having been commenced at CTC21.

The projects / teams we had were:

Bioregional Dashboards (creating dashboards for river valley bioregions)
Waste Wizards (Mapping and updating info for all UK Household Waste Recycling Centres), and
Meet Your Next MSP (creating an easily-updatable list of hustings for parliamentary candidates)

While we recognised that the latter wasn’t an obvious project to address environmental issues, its focus on hustings (which frequently help understand candidates’ and parties’ positions on climate, transport and environmental issues) made it a worthy one!

You can read the write-ups on these as we add them below. We’ll also be adding videos of the show and tell session on the Sunday afternoon.

*Project*	*Blogpost*	*Video*
Bioregional Dashboards	Build a Bioreg ion Dashboard	Youtube 1
Waste Wizards	Waste Wizards at CTC22	Youtube 2
Meet Your Next MSP	Meet Your Next MSP at CTC22	Youtube 3

Thanks for everyone who participated and who made this one of the most productive events we’ve run!

Everything below the break is from the original version of this page.

NE Climate Week Hackathon with Code the City & RewildDeeside.com

Saturday 20th March 9.30am to 4pm, and Sunday 21 March 9.30am to 3pm

CodetheCity will host ‘CTC22 – The Environment’ an online hackathon. Bring your own project idea or join an ongoing project such as mapping waste or on bioregion lifeboards. People of all technical abilities are welcome to participate.

Introduction

This event has a broad theme of The Environment.

In addition to the two suggested challenges, which you may wish to join at this event, we also want you to bring your own challenges.

The two pre-identified projects arose from the Geospatial hack weekend at CTC21. Each has an environmental theme.

This hackathon will build on this work with the goal of bringing the environmental/ climate change community and the civic technology communities together.

There will also be the opportunity to identify new challenges, generate ideas to tackle those, and form teams to create rapid prototype solutions to those challenges.

Existing projects

Waste Wizards

The aim of this project was to provide Councils and citizens with a shared Open Data source of information about Council-run recycling options in their area.

We are exploring whether using a combination of OpenStreetMap and Wikidata to store and share raw data will leverage existing data standards for codifying locations, materials accepted, materials specifically banned, and opening hours.

There is now the opportunity to harness the work being done on creating a new standard for publishing Household Waste Recycling Centres.

Bioregional Dashboards

This mapping project focused on the river Dee watershed and a proof of concept dashboard was built along with some basic data science. The goal would be to improve on the dashboards, allow other areas to setup their own dashboard for their area and to produce rigorous data science across waterflow, soils and biodiversity.

This event is for you

if you care about the environment, or
if you want to learn more about how to edit shared data sources,
if have a challenge or idea that could benefit from fresh input, and you want to rapidly develop some prototype solutions
if you want to work with air quality data or other indicators of the environment,
if you work in or study related disciplines such as climate science, sustainability, geospatial analysis, data science, computing science.

Whether you’ve attended hack events or not, there are lots of ways you can contribute (whatever your background and skill set), and you will find it really satisfying to work in small teams to gain new skills, try out new ideas and prototype solutions in a supportive environment.

And of course, it will be fully online – we will be using Zoom so that everyone can interact throughout the event – so you don’t even have to journey to Aberdeen to take part.

We’re working on finalising the exact format but the weekend will resemble this

Sat 20 March 2021

09:30 Introductions
10:00 Identify potential projects, form teams
10.30 Break-out sessions to familiarise ourselves with some of the tools and platforms
11.30 Projects start
12.30 Lunch (Grab some food and socially chat while you eat, or break away from the screens for a while)
13:30 Projects continue
17:00 Wrap up for day one

Sun 21 March 2021

09:30 Projects start
12.00 Lunch (Grab some food and socially chat while you eat, or break away from the screens for a while)
14:30 Show and tell
15:00 Event close

Throughout the weekend we will have regular check-ins where we speak about our projects and hear what others are doing.

You can book a ticket now at https://ti.to/code-the-city/ctc22-the-environment

By signing up for this hack weekend, you agree to our Code Of Conduct.

Suggested projects

We have a growing list of possible projects

Tutorials, Tips and Training

We also have a growing list of training materials.

What happens over the weekend?

At a typical weekend we follow this process:

Identification of opportunities and barriers.
Ideation to address the opportunities and barriers.
Creation of project teams to work on the ideas.
Agile prototyping of solutions, so that by close of play Sunday we will have demonstrable solutions which could be developed into real world products or services

Book now

Header Photo by Lode Lagrainge on Unsplash