Future Cities | Data & Hackathon Consultant | 2014-2016

About Link to heading

In 2015 I was approached to apply for a role at Future Cities Glasgow - a large infrastructure and innovation programme kicking off at the city of Glasgow.

Through my work with Sync I’d become active in the open data & hackathon communities and I was brought on to Future Cities to lead an open data initiative - Open Glasgow - and produce a series of high profile Hackathons.

This was my first material engagement inside a large, process oriented institution, and I was initially unsure of how I would fit in. But I quickly realised that you can be just as entrepreneurial and innovative inside a large organisation as a startup.

I did a lot of good work there, completing a redesign of their open data portal, building dozens of data showcases from internal and external data resources, successfully promoting and producing 4 hackathons with attendances well over 100 developers, designers and domain experts.

Notably - I was working with data, data owners, and data stakeholders on a daily basis - and my first experience using statistics, data science and data engineering in my day to day practice.

Open Data Portal

I’ve always been passionate and vocal about data quality and public accessibility - so the opportunity to set up one of the UK’s first governement sponsored open data portal was a dream come true.

I inherited an initial proof of concept that had had some initial implementation challenges, so we did a full redesign of the website, working on general usability issues and on the accessibility for the published datasets. We were using an open source technology for publishing data - CKAN - to manage the content, which included live publish and refresh of datasets via webhooks & APIs.

The team was supported by a team of data analysts who would broker with data owners throughout the organisation, and support processing the data prior to publishing.

Hackathons

I led the data and developer representation for 3 hackathons presented by the city. The format was straightforward - bringing together those with technical, creative and domain expertise, and seeing what they can rustle up in around 24h.

The scale of the productions however was much larger than the others I’d produced in the past - 10x the budget with a signficant cash prize of $30,000.

These events were a huge success with hundreds of attendees at each event, and a high quality of ideas output. Each of the winners from the hackathons went on to bring their ideas to fruition with a combination of the cash prize and hands on support from industry, academia and government.

Impact Link to heading

  • Facilitated the publishing of hundreds of useful, public interest datasets
  • Established network of data owners and analysts
  • Refactored and launched an open data portal
  • Produced 3 high profile hackathons

References

Technologies