government

National Hack the Government Day 2011

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Yesterday, I went down to London (on the 0505 train) for Rewired State's Hack day, held at the Guardian Offices. A busy day in London with the Boat Race (well done Oxford) and a protest.

Using open data from data.gov.uk, the theme was to create a tool for government, citizens or businesses. We had about 6 and a half hours to do it. Obviously I went along with no plan and no data ready so I began by going through some of the datasets to see what I could find.

There was a crime theme in the air so I decided on using prison population data.

Introducing: Where Should All the Convicts Go? A tool designed to help the government decide which countries to deport prisoners to. Coded primarily in Javascript, with a hint of PHP.

Screenshot

There were loads of fantastic hacks put together including games, crime mapping tools, complaint tools, weather, political and more.