At the end of September we organised an Active Travel Hackday at DoES Liverpool. Ostensibly because Adrian had collected many gigabytes of live (when it was recorded) bus location data for Merseyside and was going to poke around with it; and it felt better to invite others along to experiment too. It was only after he’d started calling it an active travel hackday that he realised bus data didn’t really fit. Oh well.

A Hackday, Not a Hackathon

So what is a hackday? It’s getting a bunch of people together who want to work on some problems together. That could be just working on something with others nearby working on similar problems, or it could be teaming up to pool skills and ideas so you can make more progress together.

They grew out of the open-source software culture in the mid- to late-2000s, with folk getting together to do tech for fun. More recently they’ve been co-opted as a way for companies and organisations to try to get idea generation and prototyping for the price of some pizza and the odd gadget; those are often called hackathons and are more managed—generally set up as a competition with folk being forced into teams to tackle problems identified by the corporate funders. Geeks love solving problems, but can also tell when they’re being exploited.

We were aiming at the original grass-roots ethos. The idea was for it to be fun; you might learn something new, or get to hone your technical chops; and we can all celebrate and take interest in what other people and teams are up to.

There’s also a focus on building something, not just talking about things. We believe in rough consensus and running code. Not that we’re going to build a finished thing, it’s a day for prototypes and proof-of-concepts.

So What Got Built?

We started with quick introductions from everyone there, which then evolved into a fairly free-form discussion about the sort of problems that we might solve. After a while, mindful of the build-don’t-talk approach, we settled into four groups.

For the rest of the day they worked on their ideas, with occasional cross-pollination of ideas or help with specific technical problems. Then at the end we had a show and tell session to feed back on what each team had been up to:

• One group looked at safety and cycling, which led them to police data and then data about bike theft. Tunde, one of the team, has written up what they built and discovered
• Andrew Wilson dug into research about the costs—in health and finances—of not having active travel infrastructure; and mocked up some prototypes of how that might be visualised and communicated
• Adrian joined a team that extracted the data for the Liverpool City Council cycling and walking improvement plan, and added it to a map the community could use to feed back other options
• The final team dug into the data available from OpenStreetMap for lighting and cycle route. Michael Dales has written that (and about the hackday more generally) on his blog

Next Steps?

The day seemed a success and there was talk at the end of running some more. Maybe also a mapping ride to collect info to improve OpenStreetMap. Not run them too frequently, but something like once a quarter.

If that sounds of interest, join the Active Travel Hack Day group to hear about any future editions.