There’s only a week to go until Summers of Data, our first event of 2015. But there’s still time to sign-up.
Kindly sponsored by blubolt and Invest Bristol & Bath, we’re getting together next weekend to make interesting and useful things for the local community.
There will be time at the event to chat with others, discuss your ideas and get to work, but its never too early to start thinking about what you might do on the day.
The data store is always a good place to start. Try browsing through the datasets to get a flavour of what data is available and hopefully spark some ideas.
To get the creative juices flowing, here’s a few ideas from the Bath: Hacked team.
Air Quality
Air quality has been in the news again recently and its been the cause of much debate on social media.
While we had some great ideas and visualisations come from our air quality hack day last year, there are more things that could be built.
For example:
- How can we have a more informed debate about pollution levels, is there another way to look at the data?
- Could we build a twitter bot to alert people about the highs and lows to make people more aware of how quality varies?
- What about a tool to help people decide whether its a good day to cycle to work based on the air quality, weather, etc?
Our streets
The apps to monitor car parks and find a toilet have had a lot of interest. They help solve an immediate problem with no fuss. What else could we make to help people use the city effectively?
- How about a tool to check availability of Nextbike cycles?
- Can we help people find a doctor, dentist or pharmacy?
- There’s a lot of planned road works in the area, how can we give people better warning about when these are planned?
- I’ve just moved into a new house, how do I find our when the bins are collected or which residents parking zone I live in? Can we help people connect with their local services?
Tell us a story
We like stories. Instead of building something you might want to spend the day exploring some data to find an interesting story to tell about life in Bath & North East Somerset.
Can we learn something by exploring changes in house prices, occurrence of crime, planning applications, or local demographics? And how can we share what we’ve learnt?
You might want to do some number crunching to find some insight. Or you might want to create a few simple charts and graphs to illustrate something useful.
Mark Owen has been doing some great work to explore how a free service, CartoDB can be used to create animated views of data in the city. These are a great example of what can be done with no coding.
Feel free to use or adapt one of these ideas, or completely ignore them and do your own thing. It’s entirely up to you.
If you’re not a developer and are not sure how to build any of these things, remember its not all about coding. We need people with great ideas and insight to explore the data and work with developers to help build amazing things. There’s a place for everyone.
And everything we do only happens with the support of our sponsors. Thank you!
If you’re a talented developer and are interested in working in the heart of Bath then head on over to the blubolt jobs page – they’ve got some great jobs for you.