What is Bath: Hacked?

What is Bath: Hacked?

It looks like Bath has an open data initiative. Nobody is more shocked than me.

A few weeks ago the open data group I got involved with held its first hack and despite my initial nerves, I’m delighted to say it went off swimmingly.

We seem to have gathered a great team of enthusiastic people together and with some considerable help from Bath’s co-working hub The Guild, we managed to pull off a pretty decent hack.

It was a pleasure to watch seriously good developers at work and they produced more open data ideas in 36 hours than any of us could have hoped for. To save repeating it here we’ve written up the whole event on the Bath: Hacked website.

Now what?

The hack gathered a lot of heads around the whole concept of open data in the city, but it also highlighted just how much needs to come together to make it an everyday reality.

We were invited to speak at the The Bath City Conference today and that really concentrated minds on how we proceed. The council is listening, local developers are interested but we need to figure out how we sustain this thing with limited time and funding.

I think the slides from our presentation pretty do a good job of explaining where we’re at:

Right now there’s more questions than answers but I’ve got high hopes. We have been looking at other cities but what excites me most is that there doesn’t seem to be a template for open data: Everybody is flailing about and there’s an unusual willingness in government for people like us to experiment.

It’s proving to be an interesting little journey. It has nothing to do with work, it has everything to do with the community I live in and I’m loving the experience.

I’m more intrigued than anyone to see what happens next.

Play Bath Open data