The Travelist team of Hackathonist 2013 developed “recycle” application during the coding challenge in FutureEverything Event in Manchester on March 29-30, 2014 and won 750£ award in the category of environmental challenge.
Nowadays, many events related open data[1] are around. In recent years, the awareness on importance of opening data, turning data into business and engagement of developer community and public authorities have been increasing through national and international events, EU-funded Projects[2], media news and publications all over the world.
Amazing Festival in Manchester
This time, we attended FutureEverything (http://futureeverything.org/) Festival on March 30 – Apr 02, 2014 in Manchester which is the queen of these kind events. The thing makes FE Festival different from the other events is being annual festival including innovative art and design with new technologies, innovative live music and conference together. The festival took place in the amazing building of Manchester Town Hall and started on the 27th of March, 2014 with many art and design events.
The conference sessions were realized by different categories such as Keynotes, Presentations, Workshops, Discussions and Exhibitions. Admittedly, one of the popular sessions during the festival were the ones related toApps4Europe – International Business Lounge and CitySDK Projects which are EU-funded ICT PSP Projects. Apps4Europe is a support network that provides tools to transform ideas for data based apps into viable businesses. The international business lounge of the project took place in Futureeverything Festival with the participation of 10 great finalists making great use of opendata. More information is available here. The CitySDK is creating a toolkit for the development of digital services within cities. It provides better and easier ways for the cities throughout the Europe to release their data in a format that is easy for the developers to re-use.
Nice Story in CitySDK
One of the other most attractive sessions of Futureeverything Festival was a 24 hour Coding Challenge for open data enthusiasts. It was organized under The Greater Manchester Data Synchronisation Programme (GMDSP) over Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th March at TechHub Manchester. Many developers, coders and data activists participated to create applications by using open public datasets of Manchester City. The Travelist Team from Turkey was also one of them. They had developed the best application on CitySDK APIs during Hackathonist 2013 (http://hackathonist.tumblr.com/), which was organized by TAGES in cooperation with Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality within CitySDK Project on Nov 1-3, 2013 in Istanbul, and won the travel support to the Coding Challenge in Manchester.
They attended Coding Challenge as a team named “Thales” and developed “Recycle” application during the event and won 750£ award in the category of environmental challenge. The application was created by using recycling dataof Manchester and the aims are to encourage citizens to participate recycling process, to simplify recycling process, to track and learn the recycling behaviours of citizens and to improve the recycling policy.
By means of Recycle mobile application; you can find the available recycling center for you and empty your trash by scanning QR codes and collect points. They also developed the web application of it which collects data from the mobile app when qrcodes are scanned.
Their success became one of the best stories in Turkey regarding CitySDK Project.
HACKATHONIST 2014
As being a similar event to the coding challenge event in Manchester, Hackathonist 2014 is now approaching! It will be realized on May 8-11, 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey. For more Information about HACKATHONIST 2014: www.hackathonist.com and you can now register event through here.
If you would like to be informed about the event, please send your contact details to aslihan.kagnici@tages.biz
[1] Watch Neelie Kroes Video about value of open data: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jq4Qy1UeAE
[2] Some open data related EU-funded Projects: http://www.citysdk.eu/ http://www.appsforeurope.eu/
