The Greater London Authority has chosen to partner on City Data Hack 2018, a Future Cities Catapult initiative that will bring together talented and passionate weekend participants, mentors and challenge partners keen to transform the experiences of citizens in London through data and digital solutions.

“The main reason for hosting this event”, City Data Hack organiser Jon Robertson explains, “is that together with our partners, we believe that collaboration with multi-skilled experts is essential for solving city problems — and that embedding data, analytics and AI into service provision will generate better outcomes for future generations.”

GLA has set participants a challenge around Employment and Skills for Londoners. Hackers will be asked to design a solution that’s capable of presenting information to citizens on how to navigate London’s available education and skills courses for their career development.

Other challenge providers for City Data Hack include Transport for London and London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.

Why is it important for City Hall to engage in activities like this, which bring together skilled individuals from across our city to explore key city challenges?

When it comes to advancing services in London through data and digital, we recognise that we cannot do this alone. We need to access and engage with London’s top data science and digital talent to achieve better outcomes for Londoners. We gain access to more ideas and skills for improving our services by extending an offer to those outside of City Hall to engage in our design process.

What are we hoping to get from the event?

By engaging in City Data Hack 2018, we’re hoping to:

• Receive new ideas and digital prototypes for solving the key challenges we face
• Explore how we might be able to develop solutions further through collaboration with others. And,
• Demonstrate that London is a leading digital city, open to working with data and digital specialists.

How can you get involved?

There are still a handful of places left for this weekend’s City Data Hack 2018 (16-18 March). Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

We’re looking for data specialists, software developers and designers to join. If you would like to take part, sign-up now.

Prizes

The main purpose of City Data Hack is to bring together passionate people to tackle city challenges. But the Hack organisers are also offering an additional incentive for participants; a chance to win up to £1,000 worth of prized goods, which will be split across winning the team and individuals who take part in the weekend.

City Data Hack 2018 aims

City Data Hack organisers and partners have several aims and outputs for the weekend:

1. Most importantly, we want to make sure that all the hackers and mentors have fun
2. We’d love it if participants created something amazing, and we have a hunch that multi-skilled teams with the right mentorship will achieve rewarding outcomes
3. We’d like to demonstrate to other public sector audiences watching that events like this can spur on grassroots innovation and investment

City Data Hack 2018 partners

Delivering a fast-paced weekend of hacking is not possible without great partners.