This weekend saw the first ever Culture Hack Scotland. 24 hours, resulted in 24 projects being presented at the end of a long and exhausting day.
Organised (prinipically) by Ambition Scotland and Festival Labs, chs11 had a number of previously unrelated datasets for the participants to play with. The most popular ones used at the weekend were the Edinburgh Year-Round footfall data (from Edinburgh City Council) and the Fringe venue dataset.
The Day
I won’t go into all of the details, especially since chs11 themselves have done a stirling job in pulling together a great documentation of the day (through Storify):
Friday night – http://storify.com/hackscotland/chs11-by-night
Saturday morning – http://storify.com/hackscotland/saturday-morning
Saturday afternoon – http://storify.com/hannahrudman/culture-hack-scotland
Other reports include: CHS11 by Callum MacDonald, Sarah Drummond’s Flickr stream, Official Flickr Stream from Festivals Lab
There were some really neat projects produced. Some were a bit abstract – such as the ones that made music out of show or footfall data. Others were a bit more useful like the Edinburgh Bookfest app. I hear Ben and Rohan are pulling together the final list of all the projects so I’ll just post an update here when they do.
My Hack: Mashing EIF2011 and Microsoft Pivot together
I managed to put together a little something. For me, I really wanted to do something that could be used for this year’s festival. And since the only programme for 2011 available was Edinburgh International Festival, and it was complete (and in an excel spreadsheet), I decided to try and get it tidied up and visualise the whole programme in a much more interactive way in Microsoft Pivot.
Since I needed to use a windows machine and my little netbook wasn’t quite big enough for me, I moved my desktop machine to have a little retro 1990s-style portable office.
It took a little while because there just needed to be some thinking behind how best to present the data and which categories to pick. Once done, it wasn’t too bad. (And because the hack was relatively straightforward, I did actually get some decent sleep in).
The result is a silverlight app that allows you to sort via pictures. Best thing is, its ready to be deployed on the web, meaning that anyone who wants to visit the EIF this year, can look through shows on the web. I just need to find somewhere to host it.
Additional Comments
I don’t have much to add apart from that it was really nice to see some people from as far away as Liverpool and Newcastle coming up for the hackday. Plus, there were some familiar faces that I don’t get to see often (read particularly: Jen Davies and Sarah Drummond) so it was great to catch up with some old friends too.
There was also some discussion about team formation/structure when we were in the pub. This is a tricky one since I know that the organisers had an in-depth discussion about what is the right amount of structure for something like this. I’ll say that there were only 2 teams which had more than 3 people in it, and while I like the fact that there were lots of really neat little projects, I can’t help feel like things could have different if there was the opportunity to be more structured. I think this is a matter of personal preference, I’m sure lots of other people like it unstructured too.
The food was amazing. Because they picked an awesome caterer. 😉
Communication channels – I still think that an IRC channel could have helped. All the comms were done face-to-face (which was the benefit of being co-located!) and through twitter. I really don’t like spamming my twitter feed, so if we could find a better solution to this issue, then that would help.
For all the little comments/suggestions, Rohan, Erin, Ben and Hannah done a really good job to make the whole day as enjoyable as possible. There have already been calls to do this again in 6 months time. But if you can’t wait that long, I’d suggest you go along to the Social Innovation Camp (same venue, starting at the same time) on 17th-19th June.
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This was a lovely blogg post