Statuses

The current situation

We are putting the finishing touches to two events which will run fully online in the weeks to come.

  • CTC20 – our twentieth hack weekend will take place on 1st and 2nd August. More details here. There are multiple challenges for all abilities and interests.  Tickets now available
  • SODU 2020 – the first Scottish Open Data Unconference will now take place over the weekend of 5th and 6th September. More details to follow.
  • Our monthly Python User Groups are back too. The next one will be on Weds 12th August.

To get advanced notice of our events, and make sure of a place, why not sign-up for our monthly, spam-free, mailing list?

Codethecity Five – Culture

ctc5min

Codethecity five is over. It took place over the weekend of 24 / 25 October 2015, and was themed around culture. Around 40 volunteers worked on some great projects. You can catch up with events on the #CTC5 tag here.

You can find more on twitter hashtag #codethecity, on our eventifier page and on github.

Scribes say hello

Our final team profile is of… well, the people who have been ‘between’ teams!

Angela, a student of interactive media, is very interested in coding and came here to learn from others and help out where she can.  She became interested in technology after completing a Computing for the Totally Terrified course, and has progressed her skills from there.

Rowan, an admin professional, has been doing some tweeting and blogging on this Tumblr.  She’s also been checking in on the teams, asking them about their projects and providing a new perspective, and in the latter stages of some projects she has been lending her CSS skills to ensuring the finished projects look good as well as work well.

Sarah, who does PR and photography; and Erin, a contracts administrator for an IT company have been tweeting, photographing and interviewing the teams about their projects.  We’ve also been publishing updates on here too. (We don’t code!)

Team #ActiveAberdeen

Team #ActiveAberdeen have also been working on a matching app.  Eventually it is planned that this could work alongside the #BigSociety and #MatchTheCity products, but presently it’s been designed along the lines of matching sports and physical activity opportunities alongside participants.  When we spoke with them, they told us they had a working website, but that it currently didn’t look very pretty!  Form can definitely come after function.

The team are Robert, an electronic engineer, and Giles, a developer.

FOIAWiki update

We caught up with Iain, an internet engineering researcher at the University of Aberdeen, and the sole remaining member of team #FOIAWiki, just after he announced that the team’s project was complete! Local authorities are required to make disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, and a log of these disclosures made by Aberdeen City Council is available on their website.   Currently the log is not searchable and it can be difficult for a visitor to the site to determine if anyone has made a similar request for information disclosure to one that you may plan to make.

The #FOIAWiki has taken the existing disclosures out and adapted them into a database to linked data standards, so that other people can use it.  It allows searches to be made by keyword, incorporates data from two local authorities so far, and is based on modular scrapers so that data pertaining to other local authorities can be contributed.

You can read more about what Iain and Johnny (not pictured) have been doing on Iain’s blog.