Young Rewired State
You may’ve noticed me at Young Rewired State last weekend. I’ve spent a lot of time at different London-based events over the last summer – and enjoyed every day of it. This one had, by far, the best venue I’ve attended in the last year or two. Still doesn’t out-do The Brewery, the venue of Adobe’s OnAIR event a few years ago.
The event was hosted at the Google UK Headquarters, a brilliantly stylish office located in London’s Victoria – a stone’s throw away from London’s biggest station, and a few stones’ throws from the Microsoft offices, conveniently down the road.
Now, back to the actual event. We were given roughly 24 hours to build the project, plus a few hours to plan and present on either side. The tag-line was a slightly misleading ‘hack the government’ – the idea is that we were to use government data from APIs, and screenscraping to build projects. In some cases, the data isn’t available yet – in these cases we were to generate our own data to demonstrate our concept and demonstrate the need for the data. We’d take the proof-of-concept to the relevant authorities and try to make the data more available to projects like our own.
Since every one of us was late to the event, and we all have fairly ironic senses of humour, we decided to work on a transport-related product – TFHell. The name was a ‘satirical jab’ at the acronym TfL (Transport for London), but we’re looking into a new (and less offensive) name for when we make contact with TfL.
We all highly enjoyed participating, and we’re now looking to take our own project to the next level. Our project‘s Twitter.