Don’t laugh at my Twitter

Don’t laugh at my Twitter

I left Twitter and now I’m back. This is awkward.

Yes, yes, I know. For someone who loathes Twitter, I seem to include it in far too many posts.

I am back and going under the none too surprising handle: @webunknown

Bear with me, there is a little story:

Blame it on the do-gooders

A few months ago I went to a random meetup of local people interested in open data, plus some people from the council.

Now obviously all people who work in councils are total bastards or completely useless – or both. Except they weren’t.

Several months on, the meetings continued and it turns out BANES has some really very excellent people. Rather than say no to everything, they said “Yes, this open data thing sounds interesting. How do we do it?”

We formed a local group called Bath: Hacked (edgy) and next week we’re holding our first hackathon on some datasets the council gave us. We have a website and everything.

The plan is to use a hack to kickstart an open data initiative in our city.

I have no clue what I’m doing

The group needed a chair and when nobody else’s hand shot up, my gob got the better of me. I am now the first chair of Bath: Hacked.

(At this point the rest of the team insisted I join Twitter so they could @at me to bask in our collective glory. Christ.)

Luckily this blog is still in pieces and nobody will read these words until I put it back together so now seems a good time to admit I’m also a little worried: Despite being a thrusting pioneer of tech – I haven’t actually run anything larger than a three man team, let alone chaired anything. I’ve also never been to a hackathon.

Luckily I do have a big head and I quite like the whole open data thing.

This could go very right, or really really wrong.

So… if you like the whole open data, transparency, power to the people thing – check out www.bathhacked.org

I’ll be tweeting about it.

Play Bath Open data Twitter