National Hack The Government Day 2012

21st January 2013, London

The Rewired State event, now in its third year, allows developers to give government a glimpse of what is possible in a day of rapid prototyping. As ever, the sheer brilliance of what was built was seriously impressive, even for a hack day veteran. For those members of the audience who were new to to this, it must have been mind- blowing.
Richard Goodwin, TSO (The stationary Office)
  • DECC have put up a prize where they will take one hack to a modding day. The final winning design is yet to be confirmed.
  • 25 hacks were made with 9 winners in various categories.
  • 1118 tweets on the hashtag

Brief

In partnership with the Government Digital Service and with the support from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and UK Location (from Defra),April saw the fourth national Hack the Government Day.
Aiming to continue the success from previous years the Government are supporting and engaging the developer community wanting to harness the expertise of Rewired State developers. The aim is to create applications and web tools that harness and manage the data presented including household heating costs, energy and household efficiency.


Process

Extensive and cooperative planning was undertaken to comprehend the needs and the availability of data in order to understand the objectives and aims of the hack day. Drawing from our pool of 1,100 developers we selected the most suitable to partake in the hack day. Due to the open nature of the criteria a mix of developers with expertise including web design and front and back end design was decided upon.


Hacks


Loftify by Stef Lewandowski @stef Winner Best in Show
  • Loftify acts as an online service where families with older relatives can pool money to help pay energy costs.The site allows you to see how much you will save and how much the government will contribute to the costs.
  • Project URL - loftify.com
Bycycle Barometer by Richard Pope Winner Government Digital Service Award
  • Bycycle is simply a tool to help you decide whether to take the tube or to cycle to work in the morning. Taking information from tube network sites and weather information from local forecasts the internal algorithms then weigh up what will be the easiest route to take.
  • Project URL - evening-mist-7436.herokuapp.com

Other case studies