The event has been going all weekend, people are so tired they, wolfed down the pizza and fizzy drinks in 10 minutes after serving and they should be looking sugar-rush nervous.
But there’s a jolly tone in the air, and even with the judges stalking between the teams checking out everyone’s new creative ideas. The probing, “I’m sorry, it does what again?” intersperse a brave developer’s sleepy pitch.
The environment hack weekend is a great idea. The up-beat tone is testament to the progress people have made on behalf of themselves and the environment agency.
What is it?
Here is a good value solution for government agencies looking to start digital projects ‘right’. There is an opportunity for crowd wisdom, creative flair, silly ideas and it won’t break the bank!
There are limits to these events, its use is better for discovering a new brief, not finishing a product. It’s for ideas and concepts not working on an old product. It’s best used as a pre-cursor for new products and available budget spend. Also, the haphazard team that had the creative idea may not be the best to make it a reality.
However, more government projects and agencies should try this model (ill be creating a template in another post) attempting to find the great ideas with all their data, using the skilled public at a small scale to look for and probe for successful services in the digital revolution.
The presentations
I saw all the presentations luckily, at the expense of nearly missing the train, here’s my favourites.
River watch, identifying the points on a canal where the biggest drop is, which identifies good places for a hydroelectric station.
Air pollution, a map app that links asthma prescriptions data to air pollution data, letting you see high and low affected spots of those two data sets.
Many penguins might die, a silly and very shareable city environment quality app which tells you how many penguins might die if you dumped them in your city. Their predicted death toll is based on water, air and food quality. Lower penguin death count indicates better living quality… Obviously!
I can see satellites, a calm app thats clearly from someone who’s done time as at the pmstudio. The app quietly reports how many satellites it can see above at any point.
