Young Rewired State – Hack the Government (Update)
Building on the success of the National Hack the Government day on 7 March, where around 80 developers created over 30 working projects from public sector data sets, Young Rewired State was created to give young developers the chance to build and create useful applications with previously released and cleared government data.
The organisers James Darling, Richard Pope and Emma Mulqueeny, co-founders of Rewired State, sought to encourage young people to engage with each other for support; highlight to government the need for good programming skills in many languages; and showcase the young talent in the largest event of its kind.
Luc Delaney, UK Policy Associate from Google said: “developers are the people who stimulate innovation on the web; coming up with new and better ways to make data useful and creating solutions that have the potential to benefit all of us. We’re delighted to be hosting these creative young minds at the Google offices and look forward to seeing what they come up with.”
Day one – 22nd August 09
After rapid assimilation of the Rewired State data wiki (one of the largest collections of UK public sector information) to inspire, the hacking began. Young developers started creating designs and working prototypes of their ideas, with the mentors providing a guiding hand.
Day two – 23rd August 09
The following day the groups returned to finish their project and to present to government officials, invited media and the luminaries in the judging panel.
The winners
in just one weekend, 16 applications/websites were completed to a level sufficiant to present to a panel of judges. After a series of presentations of alternative websites by the 15 to 18-year-olds, judges declared “TFHell” – a website offering travel information for Londoners – as the idea most likely to appeal to Google. The winners are listed below:
Most likely to be bought by Google: TFHell
“Wish I’d thought of that!”: Work For Peanuts
Most likely to antagonise the CIO council: How’s my Train?
Best in Show: School Routr 2.0 Beta
Special mentions: Theory Test, Blogotics, Unicloud, Blab to Betty
James Darling said: ‘The day highlighted better processes, applications and ways of working for better use of public data as well as to expose government officials to the concept of allowing great creative minds to play with the data to provide interesting and creative solutions.’
Emma Mulqueeny explained: ‘We strongly believe that this successful event format could be invaluable to young developers who will not yet have established the professional networks to help guide and showcase their current interest in developing.’
Further Information
Sources: Emma Mulqueeny, The Press Association, Simulation Ltd and Directgov
Image: Benjamin Ellis on flickr.com (Creative Commons)
