Its now been just over a year since we turned Bath: Hacked from a community meetup into a Community Interest Company. Which means it’s time to take stock of some of our recent achievements and plans for the future.
We set up Bath: Hacked CIC with a mission that covers three broad areas of activity:
- publishing and curating open data, from the council and other local and national organisations for use by the local community and businesses
- hosting and running events to engage with the local community and encourage the creation of useful tools, applications and visualisations
- ongoing project work to explore and develop ideas in more detail
With the continued support of the local community, council and local businesses, we’ve been able to make progress in each of these areas over the last 12 months. We also have several ongoing projects which we hope will start delivering results over the next few weeks and months.
To summarise these activities we’ve put together an annual report which you can either download or read and comment on online.
We’ll also be shortly be publishing some short case studies describing some of the projects that the community has undertaken. And we will be writing more about our project work and plans here over the coming weeks. But broadly, as we outline in the report, we aim to:
- Rethink and improve our approach to engaging with local technical and wider community. Our evening events and hack days need to evolve as the organisation matures and as the mix of local events changes. One focus will be on regular evening events to encourage learning and making using open data
- Develop our regular revenue streams, either through paid projects or sponsorship offers. We need to find independent sources of financial income to remain viable
- Move towards a programme of ongoing project work, in conjunction with the local community and other groups to create more impact
We welcome feedback on any of the above, so feel free to comment here, join the discussion on Slack, or get involved.