A gaming app to incentivise people to report issues in their neighbourhood and a website aimed at driving down costs in public buildings were among the bright ideas to emerge from last weekend’s Bath:Hacked event.
Around 35 people attended the event staged in conjunction with Bath Digital Festival, a week-long celebration of the area’s digital and creative sectors which ends today. 
Bath:Hacked sought to encourage community engagement by focusing on improving the environment in Bath and North East Somerset. Attendees, ranging from graphic designers to coders to app designers, were challenged to come up with new ‘open data-inspired’ concepts offering a potential community benefit.
Ten teams brain stormed and worked collaboratively on their ideas, focusing on green space, energy use, sustainable food and environmental protection. The teams spent Saturday and Sunday on their projects, presenting to a panel of judges at the end.
The event was held as the latest Tech Nation report revealed that the Bristol and Bath region is home to the most productive digital tech cluster in the UK – ahead of London. As reported in Bath Business News, 81% of local businesses cite access to local networks – such as Bath:Hacked – as a key benefit of the cluster.
The Guild in Bath – where the Bath:Hacked event was held – was among the hubs recognised for their role in supporting the growth of digital tech businesses.
Bath:Hacked also awarded prizes for the best ideas:
- First prize went to Enviromates, who came up with the idea for a ward vs ward gaming app offering points to players for visiting key sites in the community, for example parks, with the aim of incentivising people to report issues, for example damage or litter, via the game.
- Second prize went to School Power, who devised a website concept whereby data from councils and schools would be analysed, assessing where energy and therefore cost savings could be made and ranking them to encourage action to be taken.
- Third prize went to My Noisy Neighbour, who came up with a data-inspired idea to create an online form to report noise disturbances, offering real-time updates so people could track the progress of their complaint.
- The People’s Choice award went to Actual Bins, who developed their own version of ‘a geocache app’, which tracks players’ positions, allowing them to tag public bins as part of a treasure hunt-style game. The app also has the potential to double up as a way of incentivising players to report issues, such as overflowing bins, to the council.
Bath:Hacked is a community organisation run entirely by volunteers that aims to put open data and smart thinking at the heart of the city. Its primary mission is to bring bright people and quality data together to do useful things for the community. The group maintains a city data store, which makes data from the local council and other organisations freely accessible to all. They capitalise on this by running regular hack events that challenge people to find solutions to local problems and give fresh insights to life in Bath.
Chair Leigh Dodds said: “We started Bath:Hacked a couple of years ago with the aim of bringing about social change in the city of Bath and it is hugely rewarding to see such fantastic ideas with a real community benefit at their heart coming out of our events. Although we do attract coders, apps designers and others from tech-related industries, Bath:Hacked events also welcome people from a whole array of backgrounds, including statisticians, artists and graphics designers.
“Our aim is to capitalise on the huge amounts of open data available by encouraging attendees to our hack events to use it for a wider community purpose. Our approach is focused on creative thinking and collaboration – and we’ve seen great results already including our work on using data coming out of Bath’s car parks to let people coming into the city know about parking availability.”
Sponsors for the event included IPL, Real World Studios, Bath Spa University, The Guild, Curo, CartoDB, Smashing Conference, Bath & North East Somerset Council and Rocketmakers.
Bath Digital Festival’s sponsors were Invest Bristol & Bath, Actual Experience, Bath & North East Somerset Council and EIP.
Invest Bristol & Bath hi-tech sector specialist Rick Chapman said: “Local networks such as Bath:Hacked make a hugely important contribution to the wider ecosystem here, encouraging the collaboration of bright, innovative individuals with a range of different skill sets.
“The latest Tech Nation report confirmed their significance, stating that 5,000 people regularly attend tech meet-ups in the Bristol and Bath region – the third highest number to be recorded in all of the UK’s digital tech clusters.”
Pictured above: The Bath:Hacked event. Photo by Jon Poole
