On 21st October, with support from Verisk Maplecroft we’re running a hack day as part of the Bath Digital Festival. Here’s some background on the event and how you can get involved.
We’re coming together on Saturday 21st October to use our fantastic collection of open data about the city and the surrounding areas to develop some interesting and useful maps. We want to look at accessible spaces, transport, mobility and creative use of maps to encourage people to explore and experience the city.
We’ve nearly completed our Accessible Bath project and so we now have wheelchair accessibility information for over 90% of the city. This is a dataset that’s never before been available. And we’ve created it as a community. We now want to use it to find ways to better support people who have trouble getting about our city.
We’d love to have developers, geographers, artists and designers to come along and help us create some fantastic outputs. We’d want to see some maps and views of the city that work on paper as well as on screen.
Even if you’d don’t have any expertise in creating maps, there are ways that you could take part on the day. For those who are interested, we’ll be running a short introduction to Carto. This is an excellent, free to use online mapping tool that we’ve previously used to create some maps of the area. So, if you’ve never been to a hack day before this is a great opportunity to come along and experience this type of event for the first time. All you need is a laptop and some creative ideas.
If you’re already a GIS expert then this is a great opportunity to share your expertise with the local community and use your knowledge to help us create some useful outputs.
We’ll be gathering ideas about what to create and reviewing some of the data available at our next evening meetup on 11th October. Come along to learn more.
How to sign up
The hackday event is part of the Bath Digital Festival, so to sign up you’ll need to visit the event page on the festival website.
Spaces are limited to 20 people so sign up as soon as possible to guarantee your place.
A festival wrist band is £15 which will let you register for our event and choose others from their amazing line-up of talks, training and meetup events. There are a number of data and tech events that should be of interest. We’re also providing a free lunch and some refreshments on the day.
For example you could also learn about Power BI and Big Data. Or you attend the tech for good event, learn about using technology to make a difference and then come and put that into practice at our event.
We’ve participated in the festival for the last few years and are happy to be part of the programme again this year. We think the festival helps celebrate the amazing talent and technical community we have locally.
Thank you to our sponsors
But our event wouldn’t be happening without the support of a great local company. The whole day is being hosted and sponsored by Verisk Maplecroft. They are are letting us use their office space for the whole day and will be providing you all with lunch and refreshments. So a massive thank you to them for making this event possible!
We’re hoping to see you some of you in a few weeks!
If you’re interested in attending but are unable to afford the £15 festival fee, then please get in touch.