hack weekend – Page 2 – Code The City

It is easier to recycle a fridge than reuse Scottish public sector website content and data!

During the course of Code The City 17: Make Aberdeen Better this weekend we made a startling discovery. It is easier to recycle your old fridge-freezer than to get data and content for re-use from Scottish public sector websites. As a consequence, innovating new solutions to common problems and helping make things easier for citizens is made immeasurably more difficult.

One of the event’s challenges posed was “How do we easily help citizens to find where to recycle item ‘x’ in the most convenient fashion. That was quickly broadened out to ‘dispose of an item” since not everything can be recycled – some might be better reused, and others treated as waste, if it can’t be reused or recycled. With limited kerbside collections, getting rid of domestic items mainly involves taking them somewhere – but where?

With climate change, and the environment on most people’s minds at the moment, and legislative and financial pressures on local authorities to put less to landfill, surely it is in everyone’s interest to make it work as well as it can.

To test how to help people to help themselves by giving advice and guidance, we came up with a list of 12 items to test this on – including a fridge, a phone charger, a glass bottle, and tetra pack carton. On the face of it this should be simple, and probably has been solved already.

The Github Repo

All of Code The City hack weekend projects are based on open data and open source code. We use Github to share that code – and any other digital artefacts created as part of the project. All of this one’s outputs can be found (and shared openly) here.

Initial research

That was where we started: looking to see if the problem has already been solved. There is no point in reinventing the wheel.

We looked for two things – apps for mobile phones, and websites with appropriate guidance.

Aberdeen specific information?

Since we were at an event in Aberdeen we first looked at Aberdeen City Council’s website. What could we find out there?

Not much as it turned out – and certainly not anything useful in an easy-to-use fashion. On the front page there was an icon and group of suggested services for Bins and recycling; none of which were what we were looking for.

Typing recycling into the search box (and note we didn’t at this stage know if our hypothetical item could be recycled) returned the first 15 of 33 results. As shown below.

The results were a strangely unordered list – neither sorted alphabetically nor by obvious themes. So relevant items could be on page 3 of the results. Who wants to read policies if they are trying to dispose of a sofa? Why are two of (we later discovered) five recycling centres shown but three others not? Why would I as a citizen want to find out about trade waste when I just want to get rid of a dodgy phone charger?

Why is there a link to all recycling points (smaller facilities in supermarket carparks or such like, with limited acceptance of items), but apparently not to all centres which cover much more items? Actually there is a link ‘Find Your Nearest Recycling Centre’ (but not your nearest recycling point which are much more numerous). This takes you a map and tabular list of centres and what they accept. And it is easy to miss the search box between the two. No such facility exists for the recycling points.

Open Data?

Perhaps there is open data on the ACC Data portal that we could re-purpose – allowing us to build our own solution? Sadly not – the portal has had the same five data sets for almost two years, and every one of those has a broken link to the WMSes.

If we were in Dundee we could download and use freely their recycling centre data. But not in Aberdeen.

Apps to the rescue?

There are some apps and services that do most of what we are trying to do. For example iRecycle – Iphone and Android is a nice app for Android and iOS that would work were it not for US locations only.

We couldn’t find something for Scotland that worked as an App.

Other sources of information?

Since we drew a blank as far as both Aberdeen City Council and any useable apps, we widened our search.

Recycle For Scotland

The website Recycle For Scotland (RFS) is, on the face of it a useful means to identify what to do with a piece of domestic waste. Oddly, there appears not to be any link to it that we could find from any of the ACC recycling pages.

BUT …… it doesn’t work as well as it could and the content, and data behind it have no clear licence to permit reuse.

The Issues with RFS

Searching the site, or navigating by the menus, for Electrical Items results in a page that is headed “This content was archived on 13th August 2018” – hardly inspiring confidence. No alternative page appears to exist and this page is the one turned up in navigation on the site.

Searching for what to do with batteries in Aberdeen results in a list of shops at least one of which closed down about 18 months ago. Entering a search means entering your location manually – every time you search! This quickly becomes wearing.

While the air of neglect is strong, the site is at least useful compared to the ACC website. But it doesn’t do what we want. Perhaps we could re-use some of the content? No – there is no clear licence regarding reuse of the website’s content.

The site appears to be a rebadged version of Recycle Now, built for Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS). According to ZWS’s Terms and Conditions on their own site, and deeply ironically, you can’t (re)use any materials from that site.

Zero Waste Scotland - zero re-use — Zero Waste Scotland – zero re-use

ZWS are publicly funded by the Scottish Government and the European Regional Development Fund – all public money.

Public funding should equal open licences

We argue that any website operated by a government agency, or department, or NDPB, should automatically be licensed under the Open Government Licence (OGL). And any data behind that site should be licensed as Open Data.

The Scottish Government’s own website is fully licenced under OGL.

Changing the licensing of Recycle For Scotland website, making its code open source, and making its data open would have many benefits.

its functionality could be improved on by anyone
the data could be repurposed in new applications
errors could be corrected by a larger group than a single company maintaining it.

Where did this leave us?

Having failed to identify an app that worked for Scotland, nor interactive guidance on the ACC website, we tried the patchy and, on the face of it, unreliable RFS site. We’d turned to the data and whether we could construct something useable from open data and repurposed, fixed, content over the weekend – this is a hack event after all.

But in this we were defeated – data is wrapped up in web pages: formatted for human readability, not reuse in new apps.

Websites which were set up to encourage re-use and recycling ironically prohibit that as far as their content and data is concerned, and deliberately stifle innovation.

Public funding from the City Council, the Scottish Government and the European Regional Development Fund is used to fund sites which you have paid but elements of which you cannot reuse yourself.

Finally

At a time of climate crisis, which the Scottish Government has announced is a priority action, it can’t be right that not only is it difficult to find ways to divert domestic items from landfill, but also that these Government-funded websites have deliberate measures in place to stop us innovating in order to make access to reuse and recycle easier!

Hopefully politicians, ministers and councillors will read this (please draw it to their attention) and wake up to the fact that Scotland deserves, and needs, better than this.

Only by having an Open Data by default policy for the whole of the Scottish Public Sector, and an open government licence on all websites can we fix these problems through innovation.

After all if the non-functioning Northern Ireland Assembly can come up with an open data strategy that commits the region to open data by default, why on earth can’t Scotland?

See below:

“Northern Ireland public sector data is open by default. Open by default is the first guiding principle that will facilitate and accelerate Open Data publication.”

[Edit – Added 12-Nov-2019]

Postscript

If you are interested to read more about the poor state of Scottish Open Data you might be interested in this post I wrote in February 2019 which also contains links to other posts on the subject:

Scotland’s Open Data, February 2019. An Update.

Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening nine months.

[/Edit]

We make a difference. So can you.

At Code The City our objective is help our local community become literate in both technology and data and to use them to full advantage. We help people, organisations and charities to gain the right skills. We are improving what we do at Code The City, and how we do it: changes which are fundamental to making that vision a reality.

Our work up to now

Over the past five years we’ve run 16 Hack Weekends and, in Spring 2018, we started to host monthly data meet-ups. Both things have been very successful but are not the sum total of our ambitions. To deliver those fully we needed a base from which to operate and to grow.

Currently

We’re now set up in the ONE Tech Hub, hosted by ONE Codebase. This has cemented our position as part of the local ecosystem. Since moving in six weeks ago we’ve launched the Young City Coders sessions. Our first one, last week attracted 22 keen young people and there is a waiting list for places. We’ll run those twice a month from now on. We’re really grateful for assitance we have received. Inoapps gave us sponsorship to get these sessions started, and both they and the James Hutton Institute donated used laptops.

The immediate future

In another six weeks or so we’ll start a Tech Tribe. That’s the name we’ve given to a programme to get people, and women in particular, into STEM careers and education. Many of them missed the chance first time round. The Data Lab already sponsor our Data Meet-ups and are now sponsoring these sessions, too.

All this educational activity is reliant on volunteer time. Two of our founders, Ian and Bruce, have now become STEM ambassadors. Part of that was getting PVG checks to allow them to work with children and vulnerable adults. We have a handful of others who are going to go through the same process. But, we want to be resilient, and scale up and so we need more people. If you would like to volunteer and get the appropriate certification, please get in touch.

This week also sees the start of the new Aberdeen Python User Group which kicks off on Wednesday. Python is by many measures the most popular, flexible and growing programming language which is used in data science, astronomy, biology, security, web development…. the list is endless.

Our next Hack Weekend will be in November and will address volunteering and civic engagement. We also hope to run another hack weekend in December just before Christmas.

We are planning a springtime event: the Scottish Open Data Unconference. Details will be announced of these very soon.

A picture takes shape

All this is like a jigsaw puzzle, the picture of which is gradually emerging as we fit the pieces together.

By running coding sessions for youngsters and mums, we are starting to help families better understand the potential of data and technology to transform their lives.

By creating Data and Python Meet-ups we are creating networking opportunities. These raise awareness of the good work that is going on in academia and industry. It exposes employers to graduate talent. We help people to share their skills, experience and expertise and to self-organise.

By running hack events we are helping charities and public sector organisations to make the most of the opportunities of digital and data to transform. We also help the local tech community of coders and developers and others to give something back to worthy causes.

By leading projects such as Aberdeen Air Quality we put the creation of data into people’s hands. This demonstrates the potential of collective endeavour for a common cause. The data is made available openly for anyone to build any new product or service. And it offers up the potential for schools and universities to use that data to better understand the local environment.

By running a national unconference we bring specialists, experts, and a wider network to the city to mix with local practitioners. This facilitates discussions at local, regional and national levels and between data users, publishers and academics at every level.

Our charity values. Your values?

In addition to all of the above, Ian, our founder CEO, is a non-executive director of the UK-wide Community Interest Company, Democracy Club. Its strapline is “Our vision is of a country with the digital foundations to support everyone’s participation in democratic life.” Now, Ian has joined the steering group of Scotland’s Open Government Network. He is also now on the board of Stirling University-led project, Data Commons.

The commitment of our charity and its founders is to create that better world underpinned by data and digital, from the ground up. That means running events of many kinds. empowering people, giving them the skills and knowledge they need.

You can do your bit too: come to meet-ups; share your work; be part of a network; becoming a STEM ambassador; coach and mentor others, put something back.

We all gain and the time has never been better.

Email us now if you’d like to help!

Thanks

Ian, Steve, Bruce and Andrew

Help us make Aberdeen’s Air Quality Better

Join us on 8th and 9th June for a diverse hack weekend as we work together to identify Air Quality issues and fix them.

According to the last air quality report for Aberdeen, we have some of the worst air in Scotland. Even though we live on the coast, and generally have a nice breeze, we still have bad air days. Particulate matter is so small that we can’t see the risks: clear air does not mean clean air. This leads to health issues for some of us, and our families. It also affects how busy the health services are too.

There are some official monitors available for the city, but they don’t have widespread coverage. This means you are unlikely to be able to check the air quality around your house, your child’s school, your cycle commute or where you go running. With your help we would like to change that.

Clean Air Aberdeen sprang from our February Code the City co-design event focusing on air quality. We built some sensors, developed some analytics, and explored how to take this work further. At the end the participants wanted this to continue through an ad-hoc organisation aimed at monitoring air quality in Aberdeen as written up here. The data from every sensor is published as open data which can be used to create new products and services.

We are now ready to continue this air quality campaign to better monitor and analyse the air quality in Aberdeen. We have set up another co-design event at the University of Aberdeen on 8-9 June You can find out more about the event and book tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/codethecity-16-air-quality-2-tickets-60685063659

As before, we’ll follow our usual co-design approach to gather interesting ideas of projects, and form mixed ability teams from attending students, professionals, developers, and designers to work on ideas over the weekend.

Activities will probably include

Building sensor kits each day
Gathering weather data
Improve monitoring of devices
Use data science to create predictive models
Match open health data with areas of poor AQ
Creating alerts (hitting triggers)
Test for exceeding daily limits etc
Hosting of data for re-use
Governance activity (Saturday)
Better understanding of device limitations (sensitivity, fog, …)
Discussion of any known issues/bugs (getting people to install units once built)
Comms and promotion
Designing UK network meetup for other city projects

And did we mention food? We’ll have great catering from social enterprise The Bread Maker, thanks to sponsorship by Forty Two Studio.

We hope you will join us and encourage friends and colleagues to get involved.

Please don’t delay as the event is only two weeks away.

Book a ticket now!

Aberdeen Air Quality

Update: A write-up of this event which took place on 16-17th February 2019 is available on this page.

How much do you care about the quality of the air you breathe as you walk to work or university, take the kids to school, cycle or jog, or open your bedroom window?

How good is the air you are breathing? How do you know? What are the levels of particulates (PM2.5 or PM10) and why is this important?

When do these levels go up or down? What does that mean?

Who warns you? Where do they get their data, and how good is it?

Where do you get information, or alerts that you can trust?

We aim to sort this in Aberdeen

Partnering with community groups, Aberdeen University and 57 North Hacklab, we are working on a longterm project to build and deploy community-built, and hosted, sensors for PM2.5 and PM10. We aim to have fifty of these in place in the next few months, across Aberdeen. You can see some early ones in place and generating data here.

The first significant milestone of this will be the community workshop we are holding on 16-17 February 2019. If you want to be part of it, you can get a ticket here. But, be quick; they are going quickly.

Weekend activities

There are loads of things you can do if you attend.

Sensor Building

For a small cost, you can come along and build your own sensor with someone to help you, and take it home to plug into your home wifi. It will then contribute data for your part of the city.

But we will be doing much more than that.

Working with the data

If you have experience in data science or data analysis, or if you want to work with those who do, there are loads of options to work with the data from existing and future sensors.

These include

Allow historical reading to be analysed against the official government sensors for comparison
Use the data; wind speed, humidity… to build live maps of readings to identify sources of emissions.
Compensate readings from sensors against factors which affect pollution levels to attempt to understand the emissions of pollutants in a given area.
Build predictive models of future pollution
Fix a minor issue with the existing data Collected Data (see https://github.com/opendata-stuttgart/madavi-api/issues/8 )
Build an API for the access of the Luftdaten sensor data to allow querying of the sensor data

Software development

If you are a software developer or studying to be one, you could

Create alerts systems to warn of anticipated spikes in pollutants, perhaps using Twitter, or email.
Add to the code for the Luftdaten sensors to allow connection over LoRaWAN interface.
Create LoRaWAN server code to allow sensors to feed up to the Luftdaten website.
Security testing of the IoT Code used by the Luftdaten sensors.

Community Groups / Educators / Activists / Journalists

You don’t have to be a techie! If you are a concerned citizen, and community activist, a teacher, or a journalist there is so much you could do. For example:

How can you understand the data?
Identify how this could assist with local issues, campaigns, educational activities.
Help us capture the weekend by blogging, or creating digital content

Even if you just want to be part of the buzz and keep the coffees and teas flowing, that is a great contribution.

See you there!

Ian, Bruce, Andrew and Steve

Header image by Jaroslav Devia on Unsplash

2018 – A year in review

2018 has been a really busy year for us. Here are all the things that we delivered.

Open Data Camp

We hosted UK Open Data Camp’s first ever visit North of the border in November. Over a hundred people travelled to Aberdeen for two days of unconferencing where there were 44 sessions run on a variety of data-related topics. Some people went for an Aberdeen version of the Joy Diversion walk around old Aberdeen, and others discovered the pleasure of logging Open Benches. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and there were loads of write-ups.

Code the City Hack Weekends

We had two great Code The City Events: CTC13 – Hacking our Relationship with Alcohol, and CTC14 – Archaeology. Both were well attended and produced some very interesting results. The first saw us tackling some interesting real-world problems, helping people to overcome problems, and build a machine learning model to predict whether a beer can design would be more likely to be perceived as alcoholic or not. A report of the weekend is being written as an academic paper for a forthcoming health conference!

The second weekend saw us scanning and creating 3D renders of six real skeletons with mobile phones. We also began to create a 3D model of the church in which the dig took place, and generate data from written logs to populate that.

Well done to all who participated. We got some great feedback on each event.

Data Meetups

Wearing our ODI hats, we launched the new monthly Data Meetups in April – and managed to squeeze in nine of them this year. These are really well attended, and saw over 300 people in total coming out on a Tuesday night to hear speakers from across the country on a diverse range of data topics. These ranged from Creating a Data Culture in your business, to public Open Data; from the data of Scottish Football to the use of blockchain in Oil and Gas; and from the use of IoT in Agriculture to extracting data from photos published on Flickr in order to assist conservation.

Open Data

We’ve also been lobbying the Scottish Government and the city council on Open Data, as Ian has been writing on our sister site. That is starting to bear fruit. Aberdeen City Council have soft-launched a new open data platform, and are recruiting a manager for their open data work. While this is good, it is not as impressive as Dundee and Perth‘s new platforms, yet. The Scottish Cities Alliance are recruiting a new programme manager, and Ian has been invited to be part of a round table discussion on the way forward for Open Data hosted by the Scottish Government next February. It sounds like things will start to move in the right direction in 2019!

Research

Ian and Andrew have worked with ODI HQ to run two local workshops, contributing to two national pieces of research: the first on the effects of Peer to Peer markets on accommodation, and a second on what barriers there are to the better use of Ordnance Survey data and services.

Here’s to an equally successful 2019! Have a great festive break folks!

Ian, Andrew, Steve, Bruce