Young Rewired State

This weekend, around 50 or so teenagers gathered at Google’s London HQ for an event hosted by Rewired State – an organization dedicated to making better government websites using data they provide through APIs and the like. The task for the weekend? To build an uber-cool app from government data or anything else you can find, then present it to a panel of people from the government and other, well-respected, organisations. The entire weekend was free and I got accommodation and a train ticket down to London and back too!

The train journey to London was awesome – first time I’ve taken the train anywhere far away. Preston to London in something amazing like 2 hours and 10 mins. Tube, of course, was busy as usual (not to mention half-closed… as usual) but it’s quite exciting getting it everywhere.

Google’s offices were located in Belgrave House, a fancy new office building a stone’s throw away from Victoria station, and inside you could find sofas, deckchairs and bean-bags galore (: Tons of free chocolate and drinks and crisps and sandwiches and Google Cupcakes too!

Right, back to the hacking. The morning started off by discussing ideas. I was interested in doing something transportey so I went and discussed ideas with other people interested in the same. There, I met up with Horatio Caine who wanted to make a real-time bus info website for use on mobiles etc. (Currently this isn’t available on the TfL website.) We started work, and later was introduced to James and Lawrence, who arrived later on in the day and decided to work with us too.

We soon had our idea being developed – called, quite jokingly, TFHell – we scraped bus route information and generated the times ourselves, as a proof-of-concept of what could be done quite easily, if Transport for London would release their data on buses like many other councils have around the country. Take a look at Oxford’s Buses for example.

The final day, we narrowly missed launching a demo for our presentation, so we had to work with screenshots of our mockups for our pitch. Since we lacked a demo, this made our project look like it had just been mocked-up for the presentation, and so it didn’t really reflect the effort gone into the project generating the random times etc. However, we won the award for “most likely to be bought by Google”, and now have a cool demo online you can check out here.

The project that won “best in show” was SchoolRoutr 2.0 Beta, an ingenious app which could find the safest route to school from your house, routing around crime locations mentioned in news articles. This was developed by Stephen Mount.

It was quite sad to see the weekend come to a close, it was so cool being in Google and with loads of other people all focused on developing awesome new ideas. In the case of TFHell, I hope we can lobby Transport for London to release the data they have on live buses, and then we can take it further to do a proper launch. Thanks to everyone who came to the weekend, organised it, and to the judges for giving our project an award. (:

There is also talk of another Hack the Government day next May. I’ve pencilled that one into my calendar!