Transport Hack Day: 2 Apr 2011

Open Data Sheffield is hosting a hands-on hackday to play, experiment and build cool stuff with public transport data.

We’re inviting designers, developers and citizens to come together and spend a day mashing up ideas, creating prototypes and building apps that take advantage of some of the vast amounts of transport and traffic data that are publicly available within the region.

You don’t need to have technical skills to get involved. Ideas people, project wranglers, app testers are also warmly invited to come along and get stuck in.

Whether you can make it to the hackday or not, you can still get involved by checking out some of datasets available and throwing around ideas to find collaborators and hack-magicians.

There are also some limited places to join the teams for a show’n'tell at the end of the day, and see how some of the imagineering has gone. We’ll also be sharing the outputs with the wider public sector and open data community at the forthcoming Open Data Summit.

Data, Tools and Support

SYPTE are getting us access to lots of previously unavailable or hard-to-find data, including some real-time feeds.  They’ll be on hand to help navigate and understand the datasets that are available. There are potentially mines of information ot get hold of, so if you have a specific request, add it to the wishlist and they’ll see what they can do about surfacing it for the day.

We’ll also have Andy Robb from Microsoft on-hand to help teams quickly unlock and use the Bing Maps API to help produce geo-mashups.

There are loads of other public datasets and tools available to help create awesome stuff, and we’ll be signposting folks to these online in the run-up to the day and at the March gathering of the Open Data Sheffield community.

Open Data Sheffield is a community of local authority staff, active citizens, geeks, academics, journalists and public data providers collaborating to increase public sector transparency in the region and make it easier for citizens to understand the decisions and services that affect them.

You can also keep up-to-date and follow the developments by joining in the online group. There is a Twitter channel - @opensheffield – that you may want to follow. We’ll also be posting updates and publishing information about publicly released data on the website.

It is an initiative of the GIST Foundation, a non-profit organisation that champions grassroots technology and social innovation in South Yorkshire. The GIST Lab is a community collaboration space operated by The GIST Foundation in partnership with the Showroom Workstation.  Find directions here.

Image credit: Playing in Traffic by Ravenelle Zugzwang