Tag: codethecity

2021 – A Year in review

The continued running of hack weekends as online events due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation resulted in the widening of our attendee audience beyond Aberdeen. This saw attendance across the length and breadth of the UK and international attendees from the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. These international attendees contributed to projects that had the potential to benefit the citizens of Aberdeen that our remit looks to support. This demonstrated that our message and vision is spreading beyond our traditional geographical base. However our attendance numbers for online-only events have dwindled compared to those held in physical spaces and we look forward to moving to hybrid events as soon as we can. 

We’ve supported the creation and initial deployment of two significant infrastructural projects: Open Data Scotland and Open Waste UK both of which will fill large gaps in society’s access to data about government.

We recently appointed two new trustees, Pauline Cairns and Karen Jewell who are already injecting additional enthusiasm and energy into our operations.

Events

CTC22: The Environment

Online – 20-21 Mar 2021

Event page

Key projects:

  • Bioregional Dashboards
  • Waste Wizards
  • Meet Your Next MSP

Notable Outcomes:

  • The website  https://openwastemap.uk was launched. This was underpinned by Open Streetmap data and 922 HWRCs which had been added to WIkidata. 
  • The Bioregion Dashboard team worked to make it easier for anyone to make a dashboard for their own area. 

CTC23: The Future of the City

12-13 Jun 2021

Event page

Key projects:

Notable Outcomes:

  •  The first steps taken to catalogue open data from local authorities in Scotland. Scripts written to gather data from council open data portals and GIS publishing platforms. Analysis of the status quo were performed. 
  • Prototyping of a sound map of Aberdeen.

CTC24: Open in Practice 

Online – 27/8 Nov 2021

Event page

Key projects:

Notable Outcomes:

Impact from pre-2021 Events

2021 saw the continuation of several projects that had been initiated at CTC events from previous years, a perfect demonstration of how CTC has a lasting positive impact.

Harbour Arrivals Transcriptions

During 2020 the Harbour Arrivals physical records for the period 1914 to 1920 were transcribed into a spreadsheet with a website built to make the data open for anyone to explore and use. In 2021 a data story was created focusing on the type of ships coming into the harbour from various ports, the imports to sustain the region, and the comments recorded by harbour staff.

SODU 2021

The second iteration the Scottish Open Data Unconference

2-3 Oct 2021

Event page

Key items:

  • While we had great engagement from civic society once again, there was poor showing from Government at all levels, Academia and Journalism.
  • Good news stories in Open Data
  • Attendees from overseas and across UK
  • Demonstration of Data Commons Scotland project

Notable Outcomes:

  •  A plan to take forward a number of existing open data projects including
    • Open Data Scotland
    • Wikidata representation of government in Scotland

Python Aberdeen

We held 11 Aberdeen Python User Group sessions over the last year with 10 speakers and a total of 240 attendees.

Non-event Based Achievements

Intern Project – Summer 2021

We took on our first intern this summer. Sara, a post-grad student from Edinburgh University worked with our trustee Ian, a group of volunteer transcribers, and Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives to open up data and images from the Aberdeen Register of Returned Convicts 1869 to 1939. This resulted in structured open data for 248 convicts being made available, as well as 59 images of them being licenced for reuse. You can read more on the project page.

Award nominations

For the second year running Ian received an honourable mention in the UK Wikimedian of the Year awards.

Code The City were delighted to be nominated in the Data category at the Open UK awards in November 2021. Unfortunately we were runners up to OKFN. 

Looking ahead

2022 will see a renewed strategy and business plan for CTC. We will return to Hybrid events as soon as we can safely do so. We will continue to support and build on projects such as Open Data Scotland. We will look at hosting one or more interns again this year. We will continue to seek to better commitment from government on the provision of open data – and get participation in events such as SODU.

Thank you

Thanks to all of our attendees, supporters, volunteers and interns who make our events so successful and impactful. We wish you a quiet and restful festive season and look forward to working with you again in the new year.

Ian, Karen, Bruce, Pauline and Andrew

Header Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Make a difference with us

At Code the City we believe that the right people, with the right skills and tools, can do great things. We believe that we can use technology and data to solve many civic challenges. Those beliefs are as applicable now as was when we started seven years ago. And our volunteers who come to our events time and again agree. They know that sharing their skills and knowledge with others in small teams, over a weekend, working on a focussed and achievable project, is a satisfying experience which leaves them with a sense of achievement. It also introduces them to working in teams and in an agile way: short sprints of work and pauses for review. 

“The power of one, if fearless and focussed, is formidable, but the power of many working together is better” –

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

In the last seven years we’ve tackled many topics – and worked with multiple partner organisations in the public and private sector to solve their challenges – and to identify opportunities to use data and technology to improve how they deliver their services.

Throughout that period we’ve had some central principles that we’ve adopted which still hold true: 

  • Data, where appropriate, should be open and licensed for reuse
  • Software should be developed as open source – where the code can be inspected, and improved on by anyone, and reusable openly by others 
  • Information, images and other content should be as openly licensed as possible to encourage re-use and creativity
  • Where appropriate stable platforms exist (such as WIkidata, Open Streetmap, Github,or Wiki Commons) we should use those
  • People working in small teams and in short sprints of activity can achieve an enormous amount over a weekend

Last week at Open UK’s COP26 event “Open Technology for Sustainability”, which our co-founder and trustee Ian Watt attended, those same principles that inspired our creation, and inform our continuing work, were echoed time and again by speakers. And at the evening awards dinner we were runners-up to the the wonderful Open Knowledge Foundation, in the Data category. This further validates our belief in our approach. 

CTC’s Runner-up trophy for data in Open UK’s 2021 awards

More recently we’ve been concentrating even harder on improving open data in Scotland and the UK – but not to the exclusion of other projects. In addition to several history and heritage projects which have seen large amounts of open data created and published, we’ve had projects such as Open Wastemap which was built almost entirely over two CTC weekend and uses community-sourced data in Wikidata and OpenStreetmap to power this really useful tool to find local recycling facilities. 

Our next event CTC24 – Open In Practice is taking place in just over a week. It is the perfect introduction to what we do and to becoming involved. We already have a list of potential projects that attendees, new and experienced, can get involved in. Some of these are local in scale and some national. All need a blend of skills from attendees. You don’t need to be either a coder or data expert to participate. You can sign up directly here or from the event link above. 

No excuses: be part of the group that does the good things – or stand by and watch while we do!

CTC9 – Team Presentations

In this close-out post I shall hand over to the teams themselves to walk you through their CTC9 weekend. Check out the videos using the links below. Use the ‘ctc9’ tag to find all other blog posts about the amazing volunteering experience this weekend.

Team: Soul Cats

Team: The Professionals

Team: ALISS API

CTC9 – What a weekend!

I am so glad I joined the CTC9 project as a volunteer. Blogging about this project was a tremendous experience. There are two aspects of this weekend that amazed me beyond the teams’ achievements.

The idea funnel

It was fascinating to witness the journey we all ventured on – from random ideas on post-its to distilling them down into structured approaches.

ideation
ideas ideas ideas

planning
how things fit together

Team work

The teams seemed to develop naturally based on people’s interests. It is remarkable how smoothly people from different sectors and backgrounds worked together in a very productive way. The Code the City staff did a great job in keeping us all on track.

team work

CTC9 – Near the finish line

Here’s a quick update before the big show-and-tell later on.

Team: ALISS API database

The team has developed a draft version of the website tucked away on a test server. They have established the first functional search using the category ‘social isolation’. It returns a list of service providers in the area that is drawn from the three source databases. This is a big step forward, as we now know how to program a search and are able to deliver visible results on a user interface.

The team is also working on searches based on location by postcode or radius.

One expected challenge is the extraction of information from differently formatted data sources. For example, one source database does not provide contact details in dedicated address fields but in a more general description box.

Team: Soul Cats

This group went back to focusing on the public end users. They came up with various names for this new website that make it easy to find. They played with words from Scots dialect and proper King’s English. All suggestions were googled to see whether they exist already or are buried in amongst a ton of other results. Ideally, we want something unique!

The team suggested to submit a selection of words to a public forum in order to collect opinions or votes.

Team: The Professionals

The Professionals are a spin-off group from the Soul Cats. It’s a rollercoaster with those Cats! They went back to focusing on the value this website for health care professionals. In a structured approach they answered 4 key questions:

  1. Who are key stakeholders?
  2. What are key relationships?
  3. What are key challenges?
  4. What are the gains right now if this project went live?

team-gathering