Over the weekend, I was incredibly fortunate to take part in what was – to my knowledge – the first proper Scottish hack day, Culture Hack Scotland.
For those not familiar with the term, a hack day is essentially 24 hours in which a large group of geeks, furnished with everything they need – raw data, coffeef, sugared foods, collaboration, enthusiasm, and somewhere to park their laptops – create many wonderful and ingenious things, seemingly out of thin air.
This is a long post, so grab a mug of tea, and join me as we enter the weird and wonderful world of speed-coding with Scotland’s rawest cultural datasets.
It started on Friday evening at the InSpace building – formerly, in my student days, Crichton St Car Park. A fairly informal networking-and-beer session was followed by introductions from the organisers and supporters of the project. Even at that point, there was excitement in the air, and it was obvious it would be a great event.
Photo by FestivalsLab, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC)
By the end of the evening, developers were being encouraged to go and have dinner, while cultural people were being gently and politely directed towards the exit. Although I had a developer ticket, I felt more cultural, so made my excuses. I was left, however, with the nagging feeling that I should have stayed.
[Skip the next bit if you don't want to read about me and my hack.]
Ah, great, I knew you’d make the right decision! Now, although my day job involves working with ‘digital media’ – I’m currently looking after the development of our brand new website, building up our social networking community, designing stuff for plasma screens, training staff to use video cameras, and so on – not ‘digital media’ as in blank CDs – I wouldn’t call myself a developer. I’ve been dabbling in code since I was a nipper, but anyone who’s actually seen my code would probably baulk at how baroque and twisted it is. This, I guess, is what I was thinking: when it comes to software development, getting away with writing bad code should be my forté, so why shouldn’t I give it a go?
So first, I downloaded the datasets provided to Culture Hack Scotland by a variety of big-name Scottish cultural organisations, like the National Museums of Scotland, National Theatre of Scotland, and Edinburgh Council (who had provided 365 days of brilliant data about footfall around Edinburgh). However, I realised that if I was going to build something, I’d have to pick a dataset that had already been formatted; I didn’t want to spend precious time getting the data into a format that I could work with.
That’s where the Edinburgh Festivals listings API, provided by FestivalsLab, came in. An API (in this case, anyway) is a system you can query in order to find out information, and this one gave you raw information about last year’s shows at the Festivals – like show title, description, date, time, venue, map location, price, and so on. After staring blankly at the types of information available, it eventually struck me that it was all quite similar to the datasets I’d once tapped into a Commodore 64, some 20 (jesus, 20?!) years ago – when I was trying to make my own text adventures. Eureka!
First off, I had to find a way of interfacing with the API, which returned information in the JSON format. Ah. I’d never done that before. Or heard of JSON. Right. Since I’d done a little coding in PHP before (basically, customising my website), I chose to go with that, and headed for the excellent PHP online manual. After a lot of tinkering, searching, copying, pasting, learning and adjusting, I finally managed to get a script working that could send off a request to the FestivalsLab server, and return a PHP array/object thing (still not sure what it’s called) with all the data I needed. (Actually, it took a while because I originally wrote an iCal parser out of a fear of tackling JSON, before realsing the JSON results not only had more useful data, but were much easier to work with.)
To take a break, I headed for more familiar territory – design and layout using HTML/CSS. I also gave it a name – EDVENT, a sort of amalgamation of ADVENT, the classic text adventure from ‘the day’, and Ed-inburgh. By the time I’d done that, it was past 3am, so I surreptitiously added my proposed entry to the Culture Hack Scotland wiki – more as an incentive to actually see it through the next day than an admission that I knew what I was doing – and went to bed.
Eight hours pass… and I’m being woken up by the postman, who, unrelated to the hack day, is delivering me a Penguin Classics copy of Casanova’s abridged memoirs from Amazon. Well, you never know. But – yikes – it’s 11am. The hack day’s been going for, well, 11 hours over in Edinburgh. And I’m still in Dunfermline, at my front door, holding a copy of Casanova’s abridged memoirs.
So, after a lightning-fast shower, breakfast and check of the excellent Train Times website, I was off back to Edinburgh. I arrived just after 1pm, with a hack so far consisting of a web page that looked a bit like a retro monitor, and a function for requesting listings from the FestivalsLab API. I thought I hadn’t a nun’s hope in Borstal of finishing the project, to coin a phrase. (No, I don’t get it either.)
I’d arrived at lunchtime, so the room was devoid of hackers – it was a free lunch. Organiser Ben was the only one at a desk, and also had pretty much the only space in the room next to him, so I sat down and started coding. Handy, since Ben was the brains – and hard work – behind the API I was using! (Sorry, this is beginning to sound like a story from ‘Take a Break’ or ‘Bella’.) In the event, I didn’t need to ask him much, but I suspect his API-ness washed over me as I furiously coded in order to get the thing done by the deadline of 4.15pm. Which, to my amazement, I did. A real-time text adventure based on the live data being fed from the Festivals server. I even had time to add a few comedy bits in – additional random phrases that, I hoped, would turn it from a rehash of boring listings into something more resembling life on the streets during Festival time.
What followed was a series of presentations of some amazing hacks from some extremely talented people. Inspired perhaps by the presentation the night before, there were useful hacks, beautiful hacks, playful hacks and ‘placeful’ hacks. While they were all impressive, my favourites were Alex and Jen‘s Steal It!, where you could steal artefacts from the National Museums of Scotland; and Culturephone, a listings interface via VoIP with voice recognition, which blew my mind. Some were also very obviously marketable as products – such as the lovely Festafriend, which we’ll no doubt be seeing again come August.
Photo by AmbITion, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA)
I gave my presentation, and – as you can see – I looked less silly than I felt (what do you mean I.. oi!) In the event, the jury was kind enough to give me a totally unexpected prize for my efforts, and EDVENT was also named Most Playful Hack, which was fantastic. You can see all the hacks, including mine, on the website.
Other highlights: meeting the brilliant Tom Scott – who loathes being called a celebrity, and is pictured below with an adoring fan – and getting my very own Culture Hack Scotland mug.
Taras’s Final Thought
Hack days aren’t just a case of having fun and making cool stuff, though. They showcase the sometimes overlooked breadth of talent out there (and, believe me, there’s plenty of it in Scotland). They also highlight how important open data is, and that cultural organisations should do as much as they possibly can to free their data; if it’s useful enough, and if it’s in an accessible format, there’s no telling what incredible hack some friendly geek could turn it into. It was a great opportunity for the cultural and developer communities to network, too, and – for a lucky few – there were already partnerships emerging at the event, which look like they may evolve into commercial opportunities – clearly a great result.
The organisers, including Rohan, Ben, and Suzy (and others!) did a fantastic job, and I overheard many participants saying it had been the most productive and fun hack day they’d ever attended. It was my first time, and it’s certainly set the bar very high. If, as is being suggested, there’s another one already being planned, I’m sure it’ll be at least as good – if not better. I can’t wait.
Originally posted on Taras Young’s website.
