Tag: ideas

What can I do at Codethecity 11?

We’ve had loads of positive comments that CTC is returning on 25-26 Nov with a Christmas themed hack weekend.

Other than at our very first CTC weekend, we’ve tended to have a theme – health, culture, sport etc. Those themes have put some shape around the weekends’ activities and helped people to identify challenges to work on, projects to tackle and solutions to develop. Which is great.

Who should attend?

Anyone – despite our name, coding is a small bit of what we do. We’d be delighted to see you if

  • You are a service user, or service provider, who has a problem with service delivery, or sees an opportunity to do things better!
  • You have an interesting in service design,
  • You are someone who wants to do more with data but isn’t sure where to start
  • You are a student (of any discipline),
  • You are someone who wants to improve their local area, or use digital and skills to improve local services,
  • You are from the third sector or local government,
  • You are curious about learning new techniques and skills to use in your day job, and finally
  • Of course, if you are a developer, designer, UX expert, data wrangler, coders, or service designer.

What to expect

For many of our serial-attendees, they know what to expect and how we work. So they are happy to go with the flow. If you haven’t been to a CTC event before, having a look at those links above will give you an idea of how things go.

Some others have asked ‘why no theme this time?’ – perhaps expecting a more traditional service-type theme.

Well …… there is a theme: FUN.

If you come along, you can interpret that pretty much as you like!

Tell me more

Here are some examples, of some suggestions that we’ve heard. How much fun you consider them is a personal matter!

  • Bruce has been posting about how he would like to crowd-source a guide to fun things to do in Aberdeen.
  • Andrew has let it be known that he wants to work on his arduino-powered mini-theatre – and you would be welcome to work on it too.
  • Steve is threatening to take some robot-artist device for you to programme to sketch rude pictures with.
  • Ian has suggested that his classmates from RGU get stuck into a resurrected project to scrape FOI data.

There also have been mention of building a Raspberry Pi-powered hadoop cluster, citizen-science style home data scraping kits and a whole bunch more.

Maybe you want to create some software to write (and tweet?) its own cracker-style jokes. Or a platform to lobby councillors to provide better open data, or anything else [We said fun – Ed].

It is entirely up to you. But as you think up some ideas, you might want to consider two things:

  • Will you manage to pitch the idea at the opening session to others so that they will work with you on it? Building a project team is much more productive than working solo on something. To do the latter you could stay at home.
  • Would it impress Santa? If you want the funny old fellow to reward your efforts you need to impress him, spread a little happiness, or make something that improves lives.

And, finally …..

If you don’t have an idea to bring, that is cool too. We’ll start the Saturday with some pitch sessions, so listen to others and join a team to work on their project which inspires you.

Don’t delay, get a ticket now! Otherwise, you might be disappointed!

See you there.

Ian, Steve, Andrew, Bruce

CTC7 – Health – more ideas than you can shake a prescription pad at

In the lead up to Code the City 7 we sent attendees some blank Barrier and Opportunity cards.  We asked them to complete and bring them – with a single suggestion or idea per sheet.

On arrival people were to stick them to the wall. The response was great – with an enormous display of creativity quickly assembled. Many of these suggestions grouped well together.  As we got started, five volunteers stepped forward to be the champion for one idea each, which formed the starting point of each of the projects taken forward during the weekend. You can read more about these from this blogpost onwards. Even the drawings accompanying the ideas were great – see the montage above!

But what of the remaining ideas – of which there were dozens? I read each of them and have summarised some of them – often grouping several together – below. Each of these has merit as a potential area to explore further (perhaps at a future event).

  • Find out how busy a GP practice is, before you register

This links number of a blog post I wrote recently about the ratio of  GPS to patients at Scottish Surgeries.

  • Information on GP practices

It is suggested that there is no consistency across the NHS Grampian area – with some good examples of websites and some poor.

  • Waiting times for appointments at GPs’ surgeries?

Where is the data to show which days are busier than others. How could that help patients?

  • Live Tracking of referrals to consultants

Patients, on being referred to a consultant are often left in the dark for weeks or months until a letter arrives. How could that be made transparent? Could we have a ‘track my referral’ as you would a ‘track my parcel’? How or when will you get an appointment with a consultant? Could you self select from calendar rather than get one which doesn’t suit and has to be changed.

  • Lack of data interoperability between elements of health service / Health and Social Care etc.
  • Assist GPS to do more online – self service –  online calendars for appointments  – meaning that they can spend longer with patients or reduce waiting times for appointments
  • Citizen / Patient digital literacy

How could we assist patients to use digital services as these are developed. Which also raise the issue of health literacy – how could we assist people to understand their own health – e.g. cause and effect.

  • Persuade / help GPs to get citizens to use informal / community-based support
  • A shared calendaring across NHS Grampian to share training opportunities. Much training is common but is delivered is a siloed basis.
  • Develop a common organogram showing remits, areas of operation across the formal and inform H&SC landscape
  • Address the challenges of patients being treated in parallel between two specialists, so that they don’t feel that they are being passed from pillar to post.

These ideas alone would feed another three hack weekends! If you are interested in working or these – or sponsoring a further weekend such as this, please let us know!