Come to the event at the University of Aberdeen and use open data to make government work better for you. Come and meet other students, developers,  and designers to develop useful apps to make life easier using data that’s produced by the government at local, regional or national levels. We’re holding a remote version of the same NHGD event being organised by Rewired State at the Guardian offices in London.

The goal is to make government work better for us the people using data it already has. This is your chance to show that your ideas can have an impact and that we can do it better than the big firms.

We’ll provide the space and some refreshments, you come with ideas and enthusiasm.

When: Saturday, 26 March 2011, 9:00-17:00

Where: Room 311, Meston Building, University of Aberdeen

What to bring: you and your laptop

Sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1356255597

Preliminaries

Before you come your laptop should be set up to work well with a team depending upon your specialty. This needs to be done before you come in order to maximize the day we have available. This could include

• a version control system such as Git so that you can easily collaborate with your team
• a programming language such as Ruby and Rails, or Java, and/or the Android SDK, or iOS if you’re an iPhone/iPad developer
• web development tools to create and edit web pages using HTML and CSS
• suitable graphics tools for design work

This is not a chance to learn how to program, but rather a chance to show your design and development skills, and get experience working with others. This means we’ll provide support to help you with tools, but we’ll not teach you programming, or design.

Bring your ideas, and think up others

By all means come with an idea in mind and look for people on the day to help you implement it. Come and scratch your itch with us.

Similarly, if you just want to design and develop things, then come along too. Also do look through what others have done in the past for other Rewired State hackdays, and we’ll hopefully have some ideas that you can work with too.

In order to maximize time, and to let people mull over ideas, do feel free to share ideas in the comments below.

Remember, it doesn’t have to be a big thing, even making an app to make it easier to read the RSS feed of Aberdeen events would be useful.

We hope to have prizes on the day for categories determined on the day, such as app to save the most money, app most likely to be used by the most people and such.

We are also interested in having sponsors, contact b.scharlau@abdn.ac.uk

Data repositories and APIs

You can find data to work with at these locations, although some of it might need to be put into more useful formats. Some places to start looking around are:

http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/open_data/open_data_home.asp for the local Aberdeen data sets

http://linkedscotland.org/data the datasets used by the Scottish Linked Data group

https://sites.google.com/site/scotlandsdata/ has more Scottish data sets

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics is the starting point for Scottish data sets

http://data.gov.uk/ has the main national data sets including linked data with Sparql queries and links to the Ordnance Survey maps

http://www.guardian.co.uk/data for a ton of data and ways to use it, and get ahold of it.