On Saturday 4th July a group of 30 local developers came together to attend our fourth hack day. Here’s a quick run down of the projects that people worked on.

As we explained to people at the start of the event it was our “independence day”. The first hack day that we’ve run since becoming a community interest company. We hadn’t specified a theme for this event and instead relied on people finding interesting ideas in our ever growing data store to help spark some creativity.

As usual, the results were fantastic:

  • Historic Bath is a site to let people explore a “Then and Now” view of Bath using historic photos of the area. Winner of Best Overall Project
  • Danielle Vass created and deployed(!) People in Places. The android app uses UK census data to create a game to help people learn about areas of the UK. Joint winner of “People’s Choice” prize
  • Using a preview of some forthcoming data from the Environment Agency, Keiron Pizzey started work on a Python library for working with LIDAR data. Joint winner of “People’s Choice” prize
  • Team Dave explored mashing up the local road traffic accident data with the Google routing API to help people find safe commuting routes. Winner of Best Community Solution

  • Power House created a visualisation to explore the relationship between house prices and energy consumption. Winner of Best Story

  • Population Pie provides a way to explore and compare census data about local areas.
  • Adam Reynolds presented improvements to an interactive explorer of air quality data
  • “Crime Hackers” used CartoDB to plot locations of crime around the city
  • Team Elk explored using Elastic Search and Kibana to visualise historical weather and air quality data

Thanks to everyone who turned up on the day. As always we had a great mix of regular attendees and a big influx of first timers. Many of the attendees had never been to a hack day before. This validates our desire to continue to run hack day events whilst continuing to explore ideas around some longer term community projects.

The atmosphere was fantastic and there was real enthusiam to explore how open data can be made useful. Here are our photos of the day courtesy of Jon Poole.

The Bath: Hacked team would like to thank local MP, Ben Howlett for giving up his time to join us on the day to help judge the results and present the prizes.

We’d also like to thank all of the local organisations that sponsored us and helped make the day a reality: Vidahost, Storm, blubolt, blispa and Invest Bristol & Bath. Thanks, as always to The Guild for letting us use their amazing space.

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