Getting hacking – it all starts (and ends) at high noon.
Hacking, a little like witchcraft, has received some bad press and the first independent Hack Day in Leeds set out to demonstrate the amazing things which can be achieved by small teams in a an equally small period of time. I attended this as a visitor (read; ‘no hacking ability’) and was rapidly drawn in to this amazing world – in more ways than one!
As part of Leeds Digital Week the event format is relatively simple – get a space (in this case Leeds’ City Inn), bring together a bunch of computer coders (programmers) and interested others and give everyone 24-hours to take a technology-related project from conception to presentation.
Following a warm-up coffee we were briefed – those in the room were to break up into teams of four or fewer who would then work on one or more problems and create a response to it.
I’d like to say I stuck it out and hung around to record the entire 24-hours of coding but, being an honest reporter, I have to admit to vanishing shortly after 1pm to continue the rest of my weekend. However this wasn’t before being coerced invited to judge the results the next day. According to reports, what happened in the meantime was a lot of thinking, coding and (if I’m not mistaken) the imbibing of much coffee, sugary soft drinks, chocolate, sweets and beer.
So, after a pleasant night’s sleep – unlike most of the actual hackers – I returned to find no less than 22 projects had been registered – of which 20 were to be reviewed by the judging panel. Us judges were a mixture of techies and non-techies and I’m sure you can work out on which side I was sitting…
The four judges split into two teams and I got to hear directly from half of the project teams. To say I was blown away by the amount that had been generated in such a small amount of time would be an understatement. Projects included the slightly ‘niche’ (an application/service to ensure you didn’t arrive at geek events in the same t-shirt as another attendee or one that ‘hacked’ high-tech pens to play appropriate sounds when you write certain words – writing ‘cow’ gets you a ‘moo’!) This went through to projects with real benefit – systems to tell you the furthest you can go by plane go for your ‘buck’, tools to get your mobile to automatically do things based on your location (such as tell a special someone to get the kettle on when you’re nearby) through to a system that assists in the preparation of writing for a website.
A 21 person guide on how to present with no sleep…
The weekend concluded with 3-minute presentations by the project teams following which the judging panel selecting winners. With the inclusive nature of the event – everyone was a winner – but some special note of commendation were offered to some amazing entries achieving especially great results in such a short period of time. A big congratulations have to go to not only the hackers, but to Dominic ‘the hodge’ Hodgson and Leanne Buchan from Holbeck Urban Village for pulling the event together.
In addition to judging hack events (and a few other activities), Jon Eland is promoting the work of Open Leeds, a group looking to provide open public information that enhances that provided by statutory bodies. They are currently looking to complete a project that will allow users to add positional information to Leodis, the local image archive.
Leeds Digital Festival continues with events every day this coming week. For more information, view this previous blog post.
All images © Jon Eland 2010. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 licence.