CTC24 – Open In Practice

On 27th and 28th November 2021 a group of us came together to work on projects which applied the theory of publishing openly. On Saturday we had 12 attendees and on Sunday we had 11 people turn up. Several people were in touch, before during of after the weekend to say that they’d been affected by Storm Arwen.

You can find the Github parent repo for the event here.

We had three projects running.

The Open Data Catalogue for Scotland

The OD Bods was started at CTC23 and picked up further at SODU2021. Over the weekend the team to created a Jkan instance as a portal for Scottish Open Data and soft-launched that at OpenData.Scot

We’ve published a blog-post of what we worked on at CTC24 and how you can get involved in improving it.

The Waste Wizards

Waste Wizards was started at CTC21, and has continued regularly since then, building on the functionality and coverage of OpenWasteMap.

Our trustee, Pauline, has written the following blog post about her participation in the Waste Wizards weekend work. It shows how someone new can be integrated into an existing project.

Scottish Representation in Wikidata

Our international team finished the coverage of Government agencies in Scotland on Wikidata as part of the GovDirectory project is being worked on by a few people this weekend. Some of this work has informed the Open Data Catalogue for Scotland (above). You can read about the project in this blog post.

We will add more links and write-ups as we get them.

The reminder of this page is preserved as it was before the event.

The theory of being open is great but what does it mean in practice to work openly, to make data, images, information and code open for others to re-use? And how could that benefit your organisation – or you as an individual?

At this hack event we will explore by practicing how we be more open and support some of the key concepts that Code The City was set up to champion.

We’ll have a number of challenges (which we will list further down this page and expand on as we get nearer the event). These will trigger prototype projects which we will work on in small teams throughout the weekend. These projects will explore

Open Data – creation, curation, finding, improving; data scraping; using the data to build new products and services.
Open Licensing – taking and sharing images with open licences
Open Working – sharing our code on Github for re-use under permissive licences.

Tickets are available now. Book today!

Format of the weekend

Whether you’ve attended hack events or not, there are lots of ways you can contribute (whatever your background and skill set), and you will find it really satisfying to work in small teams to gain new skills, try out new ideas and prototype solutions in a supportive environment.

And of course, it will be fully online – we will be using Zoom and Miro so that everyone can interact throughout the event – so you don’t even have to journey to Aberdeen to take part.

Sat 27 November

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 (Grab some food and socially chat while you eat, or break away from the screens for a while)
13:30 Projects continue
16:30 Wrap up for day one

Sun 28 November

09:30 Projects re-start
12.00 Lunch (Grab some food and socially chat while you eat, or break away from the screens for a while)
13:00 Projects continue
15:30 Show and tell
16:00 Event close

All timings are approximate at this stage.

Throughout the weekend we will have regular check-ins where we speak about our projects and hear what others are doing.

What happens over the weekend?

Identification of opportunities and barriers.
Ideation to address the opportunities and barriers.
Creation of project teams to work on the ideas.
Agile prototyping of solutions, so that by close of play Sunday we will have demonstrable solutions which could be developed into real world products or services

Candidate Projects

We already have a number of suggested projects which you may want to join us to help with. Alternatively you can bring your own ideas – or frame a challenge for others to work on.

As we have more candidate projects we’ll add them to this shared document here.

Any Questions?

If you have any questions please join our Slack community where you can interact with other attendees, ask the organisers questions or make suggestions.

Tickets