16-17 March 2024
Over a sunny Spring weekend, a diverse group of attendees came together with a common interest – to explore the interface of Democracy and technology: how could coding and data allow us to better understand aspects of this topic; how could visualisation of data be improved; and what opportunities were presented by taking a technology-enabled approach, free of organisational constraints?
The Process
Prior to the event we’d compiled a list of possible challenges that attendees might want to consider tackling. These had been generated in conversations that we’d had with numerous parties in the planning for the event.
On the Saturday morning we kicked off with introductions: what had brought people here, what interested them in the topic, and what skills and knowledge could they contribute?
Then participants were invited to consider possible challenges – the ones that had come up before, and ones they’d like to suggest.
Next – anyone who was passionate about a single challenge was invited to ‘pitch’ it to the room: what idea were they most interested in pursuing? Others were invited to join those who had pitched. Teams were loosely formed – although attendees could jump between teams – and for the next 90 minutes the five teams (later four) worked on defining what their weekend project would be about.
The rest of the morning – and indeed the weekend – was spent on rapid sprints of work, where teams tackled their challenges, and reported regularly to the whole room on progress. The latter allowed non-team members to feedback, comment on approaches, identify commonalities and challenge assumptions.
The Projects
For the majority of the weekend we had four projects, each of which uploaded their code to Github. The were:
Branded School Uniforms
Branded School Uniforms making it easier to research the implications of school uniform policies. By scraping council websites, and the suppliers of branded and non-branded school uniform items, the team were able to better show the costs of items side-by-side and identify cheaper items for those most impacted by costs.
The video of the final update from this project on Sunday afternoon shows how much was achieved by the team over the weekend.
Council Viz
Council Viz set out to aid understanding of the decision making process – and under-lying structures using our local authority, Aberdeen City Council as an example. Along the way they discovered how challenging it was for member of the public to find, navigate and make sense of the information available, and developed some new ways to aid understanding.
The video of the final update from this project on Sunday afternoon demonstrates their approach and how much they achieved in just a few hours with a mixed group of coders and non-techies.
Street Sentinel
The Street Sentinel team (of one!) repurposed data published by Aberdeen City Council to better visualise and understand how many reported roads issues there are, and how long these take to fix.
Councillor Metric
Councillor Metric attempted to create a means of measuring the performance of elected officials using published data and publicly-submitted feedback. They used councillors at Aberdeen City Council as a test example. Unfortunately their project lead had to leave the event before final presentations.
What next?
At least 2 or 3 of the projects have plans to further develop their prototypes and to see them through to completion. It will be fascinating to see how they mature.
And, for Code The City, we look forward to our next hack weekend on 8-9 June 2024. It will soon be bookable on our website, We haven’t finalised a topic for that yet. If you have a suggestion please drop us a note in our Slack group.
Thanks
Thanks to Dr Rachel Shanks, and the University of Aberdeen for sponsoring the event and covering the catering budget for the weekend. If your organisation would like to support our work, please drop us a note in our Slack group.
The rest of this page remains as it was before the event.
Over the last 10 years at our hack events, we’ve tackled many different thematic topics. This time it is something new, and very important: Democracy.
What do we mean by democracy? Well, it’s not party politics. Nor is it coming with a solution, constitutional or otherwise, before we have articulated the challenges or problems.
We mean the very functioning of government.
- How do we know who we are electing?
- How do we contact them, to ask questions, or when things go wrong?
- How can we hold them to account?
- What are the various levels of government?
- Where is the data that we need to understand, use, and interact with government?
- How transparent are the workings of government?
- What tools are available (and what can we build to fill in the gaps) to make this all better?
If you have never been to a hackathon before or are interested in knowing more about the projects previously tackled then please check out our hackathon overview page.
Challenges
We will have a number of challenges – or you can suggest your own ones.
Already we have a growing list of challenges posed which you can read here – and suggest your own ideas.
How does it work?
- At the start of day one we pose these challenges and others.
- Attendees suggest possible solutions.
- Those which attract support are used to create teams.
- The teams work together in agile sprints of activity to develop solutions.
- We eat together and have fun along the way.
- And at the end of the weekend we show what we have built together.
Sponsorship
We are currently seeking sponsorship for this event. If you can help please get in touch.
Format
This event will be run as a physical event only.
We’re working on finalising the exact format but the weekend will resemble this:
Sat 16 March 2024
- 09:00 Open for breakfast
- 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
- 13:30 Projects continue
- 17:00 Wrap up for day one (TBC)
- 17:30 Pizza and drinks for those who stay
- 19:00 or earlier – close of Day 1
Sun 17 March 2024
- 09:30 Breakfast
- 09:45 Projects start
- 12.00 Lunch
- 13:00 Projects continue
- 15:00 Show and tell
- 16:00 Event close and clean-up.
Throughout the weekend we will have regular check-ins where we speak about our projects and hear what others are doing.
Catering
Tickets entitle all attendees to food and drinks. We provide breakfasts and lunches each day, from local social enterprise, The Breadmaker; and normally pizzas for those who want to stay into Saturday evening.
Who should attend?
Anyone! Despite our name, coding is only a part of what we do. It’s essential that we have subject area specialists. In this case that might be those working in all levels of government, those in civic organisations, the public who elect the politicians, and who care about their local area. Also, those who are interested in open data, access to information, FOI, public accountability, and making the world a better place.
Of course, coders, data wranglers, designers, developers, mappers, and other techies are important to a hack weekend.
In this event we are not looking for those seeking to push a party political position on the constitution or anything else. This is about making politics work better in Scotland – not advancing particular standpoints.
You can book a ticket now at https://ti.to/code-the-city/ctc31
Tickets
As a charity we aim to encourage all to attend our events – and to make the barrier to attendance as low as we can make it. We also have to consider our costs of catering and administration. We’ve introduced a range of tickets to make attending as easy as possible. These include weekend physical space tickets (for the best experience), single day physical space. Pricing is flexible with suggested and minimum prices. If we can secure sponsorship then we can keep prices down!
If cost is a barrier to you attending please get in touch and we can issue you with a ticket at no cost, no questions asked.
Book tickets – https://ti.to/code-the-city/ctc31
Please note that we have policies for participants on acceptable conduct and Covid 19. By signing up you agree to these conditions of attendance.
Code The City 