In reply to: https://aaronparecki.com/2016/03/14/1/indiewebcamp
organiser (14 out of 14)
- Coming soon...
- weekly or bi-weekly - so stay tuned for more info about that. (And if you want to help or participate, get in touch!)
- Standardising visualisation (headed by Bob Kerr)
- Small scale voluntary organisations (headed by Leah Lockhart)
- Sustainability of data projects (headed by Ewan Klein)
- Innovative Learning week at the University of Edinburgh is an annual week of off-timetable activities for students, designed to enhance their learning experience. Arguably every week in higher education should be innovative and striving provide the best possible education... And Innovative Learning implies the student should be making the special effort and I don't think many would be happy with the idea of paying so their tutors can have a week off, so maybe Innovative Teaching week would be more... better. But that aside.
- Students could pre-register, add some info about themselves and start to form teams online.
- Anyone interested in getting involved who wasn't a student could figure out where they might fit in and get in touch. This included people who could sponsor prizes, present real-world challenges to solve, offer data to be wrangled, or provide technical support to participants.
- Best for travel
- Best for health and wellbeing
- Best for communities
- Best visualisation or UI
- (First year prize for) Best data mashup
- Tom Armitage and Stuart MacDonald, for handling geolocated resources.
- Philip Roberts, for data visualisation with d3.js.
- Oli Kingshott, for an introduction to version control, and HTML5 for beginners.
YRS Edinburgh 2015
☑ Attending!
This year I'm Centre Lead for Edinburgh (Prewired) YRS Centre. Kids hack all week, and we (Scottish Centres teaming up) take a coach to Birmingham on Friday for the Festival of Code at the weekend.
RSVP
YRS Edinburgh 2015This year I'm Centre Lead for Edinburgh (Prewired) YRS Centre. Kids hack all week, and we (Scottish Centres teaming up) take a coach to Birmingham on Friday for the Festival of Code at the weekend.
Local organiser, BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium
☑ Attending!
Super excited to bring the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium to Edinburgh for the biggest and best one yet! I've been to every Lovelace since 2009 and lightly helped with a few; I've got so much out of this event, it was awesome to be able to really give back. (Handled local sponsors, arranged venue, catering, social event, stored a literal tower of boxes of swag in my office; ramped up recruiting for Edinburgh participants including running a poster making workshop a couple of weeks beforehand).
RSVP
Local organiser, BCSWomen Lovelace ColloquiumSuper excited to bring the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium to Edinburgh for the biggest and best one yet! I've been to every Lovelace since 2009 and lightly helped with a few; I've got so much out of this event, it was awesome to be able to really give back. (Handled local sponsors, arranged venue, catering, social event, stored a literal tower of boxes of swag in my office; ramped up recruiting for Edinburgh participants including running a poster making workshop a couple of weeks beforehand).
Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Reprised my role as very-stressed-person and just about pulled off another successful week with around 100 students including (!!) business and design students; smartdatahack.org.
Co-organiser, Edinburgh Centre, Young Rewired State
Helped to organise the local centre, recruited participants in the run up; we got teams through to the semi-finals this time! The Festival of Code was in Plymouth this year, so most of our participants couldn't make the trip; organised a mini-alternative with Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen centres, in Dundee instead.
Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Tried backing away for this year's SDH; co-opted some undergrad minions to delegate to, and handed off the website to CompSoc. Still ended up doing quite a lot, but managed to salvage enough time to also write a paper in the run-up, so delegation: successful.
Prewired 3
Our third Prewired event went smoothly, with 20 young people (about 4 new) and 7 or so parents attending, plus 8 mentors. So lower signups than usual (a few cancellations due to school commitments), but we decided not to do a big publicity push and see how it ran with a smaller group. I didn't notice much difference, since they organise themselves into smaller groups anyway to work on different things. I think next time we'll try to reach our capacity of 40.
We had a big group working on a variety of Python projects (games, basics, algorithms, I'm not sure what else..), a small group doing front-end web, and quite a few doing amazing things with Scratch.
Every week I discover new things these super-talented young people are doing with their time, and it won't be long before many of them are spending a lot of time mentoring their peers as well as working on their own projects.
Nantas came by to talk about what he does with the University's Robotics lab, including the challenges of making humanoid robots play football, and the state of the art, two-million-pounds, full sized humanoid robot that is moving to Edinburgh in the near future. Definitely stuff to get young people excited about learning to code.
We've been trying to encourage them to code between Prewired sessions, too, and about half of them said they had. I hope by the next time all of them have, and I'm really excited to see what they're capable of making in a few months time!
But...
Some of the young people attending are disadvantaged by not being able to bring their own laptop, or having only really old laptops which can't support modern browsers and therefore have trouble even executing the JavaScript their writing (true story).
We'd love to be able to pay for a set of simple but up-to-date laptops that we could lend to the attendees who don't have their own during sessions. This at least will put them on a level playing field with the others during the sessions, and I suspect that many of them have adequate desktop machines or family laptops at home.
Prewired runs on a budget of volunteer blood, sweat and tears, and zero pounds. We're lucky enough to be able to use space in the University Informatics building for free, and there are no shortage of keen mentors and helpers willing to chip in their time (and in some cases cash for snacks).
So if you work for a company who might be able to support the purchase of resources for our young coders, or know someone who does, then please get in touch!
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The Launch of Prewired
Several weeks of debating and planning following Young Rewired State finally came to fruition on the 16th of October, with our first Prewired event.
Thirty eight kidsyoung people arrived between 9:30 and 10 on that
Wednesday morning (it was half term week in Scotland, so we weren't pulling
them out of school), grabbed some kindly donated Google swag, made name badges
with stickers and felt-tipped pens, and sat down for two and a half hours of
lightly guided learning.
They were between the ages of three and eighteen, although the three to six year olds were more there to be tagging along with older siblings or University staff. It's obviously impossible to divide attendees up by age and decide what to work with them on, as older definitely does not mean more experienced. We had decided on no lower bound for the age limit, and no lower bound for experience either, figuring that the only real requirement is enthusiasm about programming. There was a huge mix of interests and abilities, and we let them decide for themselves which topics would be worth listening to.
We also had about fifteen students, University staff or industry professionals along as mentors.
After a few minutes of welcomes, where most of the room were willing to introduce themselves and tell us what they wanted to learn ("Python", "Scratch" and "more about programming in general" were popular ones) we kicked off with three five minute introductions: to HTML and CSS (beginner), to HTML5 Geolocation (intermediate) and to Python's Natural Language Toolkit (advanced). They then had the chance to spend 40 minutes in a hands-on session for whichever of these they chose. The groups were very evenly spread, and despite a few hiccups with Python installations on Windows and Chrome not playing nice with geolocation (worked through thanks largely to the mentors) most people got some code up and running and appropriately hacked about with by the end.
We took a break for juice, crisps, chocolate and fruit, plus a bit of hardware tinkering. We'd borrowed a Nodecopter, but hadn't managed to get it charged in time so it wasn't in the air, but there were still plenty of people interested in looking at the code to control it. We also had a demo of a robot arm, which could be controlled by an Android app connected to a Python server, which had been written over the summer by one of our mentors.
Next up were three more lightning talks: introduction to Scratch (beginner), doing cool things with Redstone Circuits in Minecraft (intermediate) and introduction to PyGame (intermediate-advanced). The following hands-on session for Scratch was under-attended, possibly ousted by the allure of Minecraft, but the PyGame session had over a third of the group and made some great progress, which was awesome.
We finished a little late, but still managed to have time for a quick demo of a football playing robot from the nearby robotics lab, and a few attendees who took their time dragging themselves away from their screens.
I'm told that overall it was a success. I was concerned because I was
generally called upon when something was going wrong, so my perspectively was
weighted towards the negative. But it wasn't too chaotic, none of the
kidsattendees played up, and as far as we could tell they were
doing something in some way productive at all times.
A lot of them had had little to no programming experience before that morning, and I really hope they were able to take away something positive and, most importantly, feel encouraged to try things out by themselves at home. Plenty, too, had enough experience that they were calling out to correct the speakers, and helping their peers to get things working. It's a huge challenge to find enough activities to engage so many different levels of experience and interest, and I don't think we did a bad job.
Our next Prewired event will be on the 30th of October, and we're running them bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings from now on. They will be henceforth less structured. Our primary aim is to help young people to realise that with programming (and related areas) they can create anything, express themselves, and change the world. We don't wish to enforce a curriculum, but encourage them to explore areas they are interested in, learn how to teach themselves and figure out how to make what they want, and most of all to persuade them not to be afraid to experiment - to hack - and to just keep trying if it doesn't work first time. To get them excited before they become jaded and before this society's stereotypes have a chance to impact on them.
You can find out more about Prewired at prewired.org, and join the mailing list there too.
Photos and feedback
Here are some of the photos from the day:
If you took some that you'd like us to add, then please send them to hello@prewired.org!
Similarly, send any feedback you have about the event to us that way, as well.
Resources
I'll update this post (as well as the website) with resources from the speakers and mentors as I get hold of them.
Beginning HTML and CSS:
HTML5 Geolocation:
Building a chatbot with Python's Natural Language Toolkit:
Intro to Scratch:
Minecraft Redstone Circuits:
Intro to PyGame:
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Young Rewired State in Edinburgh #yrs2013
Young Rewired State is a week-long hack event for under 19s. There are centres all over the UK, and the week finishes with a giant sleepover in the Custard Factory in Birmingham, presentations and prizes.
I was helping out with running the Edinburgh centre this year, between the 5th and 11th of August. We had 15 young people taking part, and a few parents popping in and out as well. Not to mention several fantastic mentors.
Every day we gathered in one of the University of Edinburgh Informatics computer labs. On the first day we did some brainstorming, introduced the young people to Open Data, and they sorted themselves into teams.
We had a diverse range of projects by the end of the week.
The Weatherproof app was written in Scala with a Web frontend, and as well as telling you the weather forecast, gives you practical advice on what to wear and what to take with you.
_Stuff Index _was a Python Web app that lets people photograph and upload stuff they've left out on the street that they want to get rid of, so anyone browsing the site can opt to take it away if they fancy it. Helping to keep stuff out of landfill, and without the dreaded social interactions that come with Freegle.
Tag is a game by a one-man team, with a Python game server and a JavaScript front end that lets you chase your friends around the real world, and automatically tags them when you're in range.
_PokeGame _is a real-world Pokemon simulator that lets you roam IRL and capture virtual Pokemon.
Great stuff!
On Friday we crammed into a coach along with the participants from Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow, and set off on a seven hour road trip to Birmingham for the finale.
The Edinburgh teams didn't win anything, but the presentations were fantastic and everyone had an amazing time. The young people made new friends, learnt tons of new stuff, and hopefully remain enthused about coding.
Next year we're going to do more to walk through the creation process of some example apps to get them started off, and maybe do a better job of introducing Open Data and the possibilities it holds.
We're also thinking about starting a regular under 19s code club in Edinburgh
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Co-organiser and mentor, Edinburgh Centre, Young Rewired State
Helped to organise the local centre, recruited participants in the run up, and helped with mentoring during the week. Also helped to supervise a coachload of kids for the trip to the Festival of Code.
Open Data Day: Joined Up Edinburgh #joinuped
The 23rd of February was International Open Data Day. Since this fell at the end of the ILWhack week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take advantage of the momentum and engage the stirring Edinburgh Open Data scene.
Many ODD were organised around the world; most of them were hacks. In Edinburgh we went for a different approach, thanks largely to input from local community activists like Freda, Leah, Andy and Ally. Some might call it 'social hacking'. Our aim was to gather together people with little knowledge of Open Data, people with data that may or may not be open, and developers and technical types.
With Open Data stuff exploding worldwide, and developers going nuts creating cool apps and services that make use of data being released, it's important, you see, for {local, small-scale, voluntary, grassroots} groups and individuals to get involved early on. Such parties are arguably likely to benefit the most from empowerment by data, and if they're not part of the discussion early on we might well see a lot of services developed that meet needs imagined by a not-quite-connected but well-meaning tecchie.
So on that note, we want to spread the word about Open Data to those who might normally be left behind. When these groups know what the possibilities are (we can show them successful projects, locally (eg. ILWhack) and worldwide), what is available, and what could and should be available, we empower them to take action that will benefit them. More specifically, people can find out that the English government has released data about such-and-such-of-interest, and politely demand that the Scottish Parliament or local councils do similarly. They can interface early on with developers who are keen to start making, and make sure their real problems get solved (or at least prioritised over potential imaginary ones). They can get involved with things like ILWhack, and have a better idea of what it's all about.
Between 10am and 2pm, we gathered around 35 people in the Informatics Forum and, fuelled by tea, coffee and biscuits, began the discussion.
We started with an hour of ten minute talks, about a variety of topics:
Sally Kerr told us about Open Data at the City of Edinburgh Council; the progress they've made so far and where they hope to go in the future; NESTA's local government Make It Local programme helped Edinburgh Council to move forward with Open Data. She gave a nod to the ILWhack projects that made use of Council data in the week prior.
Alex Stobart of MyDex talked about big, open data, and the challenges this presents to citizens and politicians.
Iain Henderson explained the Standard Label; an easy to read specification for data holders to present to their users how the user data will be used. Like nutritional advice, but for data.. Other ODD events were centred around hacking with it we spoke!
Bob Kerr talked about OpenStreetMap and GeoRSS. I love the obsessive hyperlocal detail in some places, like where the animals live in Edinburgh Zoo. On a serious note, OSM has really empowered local governments and NGOs in developing countries.
Andy Hyde discussed asset mapping for voluntary groups; how ALISS collate dispersed health and wellbeing information into a central, open repository, ripe for manual and programmatic access.
From Lizzie Brotherston we heard about the Post-16 Learner Journey Project; helping the Scottish Government understand the learning landscape. They're holding a hack in April.
Next it was unconference time!
We had a short while of whole-room discussion, before identifying three key areas:
Everybody picked a group and we broke apart for the next couple of hours.
The final part of the day was a return to the main room, and further room-wide discussion of the breakout debates.
The _s__tandardising visualisations _conversation focussed around bringing people into conversations about data using visuals. Someone pointed out that if news readers used Open Data visualisations, the general public would be a lot more interested in Open Data. It's interesting to imagine a future where data visualisations are embedded into the world, into the landscape. To be able to interact with data meaningfully, you've got to know what it is - to recognise it. A standard - think periodic table - would help people to know exactly what you're talking about straight away. This goes beyond graphs and charts, into a world of layered visualisations that allow layered public contributions of interpretations.
Those interested in small scale voluntary organisations discussed data holding and data access issues, including strategies for persuading big organisations to open data (eg. by showing success stories, and proving a certain return on investment). It was agreed that interfacing with developers is important to get things done that organisations really need; but organisations might not know what they need. It was discovered that there's a lot of crossover between groups represented by people who were in this discussion; common needs but gaps in talent.
Finally, with regards to sustainability of data projects it was agreed that strategies are needed for keeping things going beyond short hack events; how to sustain that burst of energy for a longer term usefulness? How to keep track of everything that's going on, and link communities with events (see OpenTechCalendar!). Some kind of coordination body might be useful, or working groups / task forces.
We wrapped up, collected everyone's details for sharing (to ensure sustainability of the outcomes of the day by making sure everyone can keep in touch!) and people began to drift away.
There was an enormous positive energy throughout the day. Discussions were lively and passionate, and we had an excellent mix of people, exactly as hoped for.
NB. It looks like Joined Up Edinburgh will come under the umbrella of the Scotland branch of the Open Knowledge FoundatioN, so http://scot.okfn.org will be a good place to keep an eye on now. And to keep in the loop, join the Joined Up Edinburgh mailing list.
Other people have blogged about this too. Check out these by Leah Lockhart and Dave Meikle (more links welcome).
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The Smart Data Hack #ilwhack
In reply to: http://smartdatahack.org
I spent a good deal of time during January and February helping to organise a couple of Open Data oriented events. At least, that's the excuse I'm sticking to for not having done much of my PhD in that time.
The Smart Data Hack, also known as ILWhack (Innovative Learning Week* hack) came first, between the 18th and 22nd of February.
The hack was targeted at first and second year undergraduates in Informatics on the basis that third and fourth years would be busy with final projects. This was by no means a restriction however, and we harboured hopes of enticing along design students and data buffs from other departments to mix up the skill set a bit as well.
I knocked up a website with two primary functions.
We anticipated about 50 students, and invited them to form teams of up to 5.
In parallel with gathering sponsorship, we came up with five prize categories of equal merit:
We hoped to encourage students to make whatever they wanted, using whatever technologies they wanted, with use of open (or specially provided) data being favourably looked upon.
Skyscanner were the first main sponsor on board, pledging prizes for two categories and some massive datasets that aren't usually public and access to internal APIs, as well as engineers to mentor.
We partnered with ALISS to encourage use of their local health and wellbeing data API; ALISS also sponsored in part a prize category.
The City of Edinburgh Council were on board with some never-before-seen downloadable datasets (still online!), a bunch of pre-approved API keys and refreshingly open minds and supportive attitudes.
CompSoc heroically sponsored an entire prize category and promoted the event to its members.
Open Innovation sponsored a prize category too, and the School of Informatics contributed towards prizes and catering.
Greener Leith proposed a challenge and sponsored a special Mosque Kitchen lunch for everyone after the mid-point presentations on Wednesday.
We were able to hold some terrific practical workshops, thanks to:
We also recruited mentors from UG4 and PhD students, as well as industry professionals, who were consistently present in the hacking space all week or available by Twitter, email and IRC.
We marketed the event in the couple of weeks prior (though we were organising up to the very last minute) through shout outs in lectures, posters around the Informatics department, emails to many university mailing lists and word of mouth.
As a result, we overshot our expected numbers, with well over 100 sign-ups by the start of the week. This was good news and bad news at the time, as we had to scramble around to make sure we had enough sponsorship to feed everyone and whatnot.
By the end of the week, there were around 80 students still actively participating, across about 25 teams. Pretty good! Most of them were Informatics undergraduates as expected, but we had a handful of postgraduates and students from the ECA as well.
And the outcome?
Some amazing projects and really positive feedback from participants and supporters alike.
Naturally only a couple of days passed before somebody noticed that I hadn't sanitized input fields on the website for HTML and CSS input, so they made the projects page spin and play the Harlem Shake before I sorted that out, having been alerted at around midnight. /grumble. Should have seen that coming, of course.
In the end we gave away £1500 in Amazon vouchers, five Nexus 7s and ten Kindle Fires. Skyscanner even upped their sponsorship to three prizes because they were so spoilt for choice.
You can read about the projects, teams and see some demos here.
It was a really exciting and inspiring week for everyone involved. Many of the students are taking their projects further (which is probably the most important outcome) and are in discussions with relevant parties to do so.
You can see photos and see other peoples' write-ups about the event here.
Will we do it again next year? From the feedback gathered, the response has been a resounding yes!
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Co-organiser, Open Data Day Edinburgh
Helped organise the Edinburgh branch of International Open Data Day unconference.
Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Dropped the ball on my PhD for months to wrangle sponsors, set up the website, recruit participants and generally get shit together. It went well, with feedback from students like "easily the most useful and fun week I've had since I started uni".