The event is a unique opportunity for Dundee City Council to explore open data in collaboration with entrepreneurial minded data scientists, games developers, and ethical hackers, to develop ideas that would benefit the running of the council.
It will be held at Abertay University’s White Space on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 March. The focus is for projects that look specifically at smart city data and improvements in sharing and understanding. These can range from games and visualisations, to infographics and storytelling.
But good ideas don’t only live in the heads of those who’ve been through years of schooling in data wrangling. The event is hopeful that people with nothing more than a healthy dose of curiosity and a head full of good ideas turn up as well.
We are planning a series of talks and workshops during the hack to help people connect their ideas with data even if they haven’t coded or wrangled in the past.
We are releasing the first challenge this week in relation to the substantial GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data. If you haven’t seen that term before that’s a fancy way of saying mapping data. Which in turn will allow us to map various aspects of Dundee’s open data.
We will be issuing several data sets with emphasis on mobility, air quality and food trading standards. Our aim is to encourage the ability for teams to design mapped visualisations of data across Dundee juxta positioning layers on top of each other.
For example wouldn’t it be neat to see a 3D model of Dundee displaying traffic patterns as they links to air quality, particularly at high traffic areas, and then throw in some weather data to see the effect of wind and precipitation? If we could inspire a bunch of newcomers to work through this even more the better.
Register for your free place today.
Abertay University
A modern university with a long history and a clear sense of our distinctive mission, highly regarded for our academic performance in areas with genuine relevance and impact on society and the economy, and with a community of talented students and academics who make us the success we are.
Dundee City Council
Dundee draws skilled workers from a 60-minute catchment population of 640,000 and has a local population of over 140,000. The availability of a large pool of highly skilled labour is a key feature in the Dundee economy. Flexibility in the labour force is currently more prevalent in Dundee than in Scotland as a whole. All forms of labour market flexibility - part-time, temporary employment, self-employment and shift work - are widely operational within the city. Labour force stability in the city is excellent, enabling companies to plan with confidence. Labour turnover levels are less than 5% and absenteeism averages 2%.
