A Hackathon for Sector Data & Services
A Hackathon for Sector Data & Services
Sunday 13th April, 2025, Shoreditch Town Hall
Penguin - Session 4 (1145-1315)
Mark Simpkins (msimpkins@gmail.com)
The call was
‘If I arranged a hackathon to start organising, gathering and claiming control over sector data and services would you come?’
Through some discussions on how to talk about and ‘brand’ such a thing, the word ‘Hackathon’ does not always have the best connotations.
It needs to be made clear that not knowing programming or in fact anything about technology is necessary to take part, having an interest in the information or processes that you use in your work is all you need as the work is collaborative and the results are co-constructed.
Some problems can be potentially quite complex (and there is always the risk of over technologising ideas as solutions), but work around participants in politically connected work and the need to protect identities etc can make data protection and risk assessment quite complex.
(How to model such risk is of interest to me as I have previously done work on how to model and examine risk in sociotechnical systems).
How are results maintained and continue to be contributed too? Incentivising participation can be tricky but equally we have existing models that do work. Wikipedia is one.
Maybe framing as an infrastructural layer of open data is useful, the industry/ scene can be useful.
How do we make sure that things made are shared with the community and the community can feedback about what is made?
Is this a one off, irregular thing or something more regular. (There are a number of civic, political and just tech for tech sake groups that meet on a regular basis as well as talking together online)
I shared a few stories such from the early Civic Software space about how ‘Fax Your MP’ was built by a couple of techies who were civicly/politically engaged. It was running of a computer / fax modem for a number of years before it was taken on by MySociety.org as a properly supported service.
Or the Online Polling Station finder which was built by Democracy Club, which has only just been taken on by the Electoral Commission as under their remit (this is a good 10 years since it was built).
Finally Imogen Heap ran a number of workshops on how artists maintained data is beneficial to the industry and artists (under the moniker of Mycelia). From this was built the Creative Passport, now branded Auracles.io which is a music makers data management tool for their creative persona data (Disclosure: I was the CTO for the Creative Passport and still work and advise on Auracles and I organised the Mycelia meetups)
Possible Outcomes:
* A shared document that collects the useful services, mailing lists, data bases of resources, etc
* How might organisations make more use of the data they hold about freelancers etc with regards to work, how this might be managed under GDPR etc.
* digital identity for artists (uses and risks)
Next Steps
* Find a space
* Find a date (do people prefer a shorter ‘evening’ during the week or a longer ‘day’ on a weekend)
* How to get the invitation to participate out
* How do we share the results of the event
* Do we hold a regular event (e.g Campaign Lab, which supports the Labour Party with data and software tools meets at Newspeak House in Shoreditch every couple of weeks for an evening. They also have groups on WhatsApp etc)
Mark will be posting updates on https://www.uncouncil.art/