Hack-ney-thon -> Threads
24 Hours To Hack The Council

15 November & 16 November
Trampery Publicis Drugstore, Old Street Roundabout

More info + RSVP

We are asking for suggestions in advance of the event but here are a few ideas that the council have picked out (you can make suggestions by emailing hello at minibarlabs.com:

1.Wedding Community Site – ‘Getting Hitched in Hackney’

There are currently no external communications for council wedding services and all information is relayed via individual emails through enquiries. Hackney Council’s Registrars (Births, Marriages, Deaths and Nationality) department would like to find a way to make their wealth of knowledge publicly available and at the same time create a space for venue listings, for local businesses to advertise services and for couples to share tips and rate their experiences.

Examples of external communications from other councils would be brochures or static areas within the council’s main website. However the idea here would be to encourage more participation and communicate the excitement felt by couples approaching the Big Day. The aim would be to make interacting with the council service fun and the branding of the portal would be community and couple focused. This would be independent from the main hackney.gov.uk site, something in the vein of Mumsnet or TripAdvisor where the council staff can have a voice amongst other local people. In terms of functionality the portal could include features like a forum, venue listings, venue and service mapping and user rating, advertising space and importantly a connection to the council’s venue booking system (as described above).

1. 2. Booking system

Hackney Council’s Registrars (Births, Marriages, Deaths and Nationality) department provide a wide range of services, however only a selection of these are currently made available for public booking online – making appointment to register births and deaths. All other bookings are booked through telephone and email enquiries. This is a disjointed process which takes up council staff time and due to the spike in enquiries over the weekend, loses potential clients as response rates are slower. Hackney Council would like you to come up with a way for couples to make appointments to view as well as book and pay for the wedding venue of their choice. This would free up staff time and save money at both ends of the process for the council.

Commercial Property Services
Booking Process for Viewing and Applications
Email Management System

Commercial Property Services

1. Booking Process for Viewing and Applications Email Management System

The Council has a commercial portfolio of well in excess of 300 properties, a large proportion of which are retail units. There is a relatively high turnover and typically there will be 5 – 10 units available for rent. The Council aims to have as close to 100% occupancy as possible.

The Commercial Estates team receives a high volume of enquiries for commercial property, which are managed through an online form and over the phone. However, the system still requires a fair amount of manual processing, which is costs time and can also permit human error. The team needs you to help them smooth out the online enquiries process and in addition to this ensure that the list of would-be tenants is shaped and more easily called upon through an email management system for future marketing purposes.

The online form can be viewed here: hackney.gov.uk/property. The issue lies in what happens after the form is filled out, as once submitted all data is transferred into a spreadsheet, which then requires manual processing for future mailshots.

The team needs:

• – a central hub to gather and collate both mail and telephone enquiries as well as connect this to an email management system a way to more accurately categorise the user’s request (through the selection of additional criteria on the enquiry form perhaps) as council staff currently have to search through each individual email.
• – a prompt to next action on the form such as booking a viewing.
• – an online application form to rent a property – currently this has to be printed out and provided in hard copy

After submission:

• the user should get an automated mail that acknowledges their enquiry.
• the user should be tagged and added to the relevant email list

Ideally we would like to end up in a position where if we have a 1000sqft shop to let at £15,000pa, we can insert these details into a program that will automatically email all enquirers with matching criteria.

Open Thread

Hack-ney-thon will be an exciting opportunity for developers to access a large number of datasets gathered and maintained by the ICT department on activities across the whole council. This is an open thread where we invite developers to investigate and experiment with material, seeing what insights can be revealed through manipulation and what innovative new tools can be produced. In advance of the day the department will make a number of these sets available via GitHub and provide descriptions of some insights into its use and potential application.

Interactive Mapping
One area of focus in the department is in mapping the local area. They is committed to meet the specifications of the EU’s INSPIRE Directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community – http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/). Through their work they have developed several tools such as; Map.Hackney2.0; MapGallery; Plan Web and the resident facing Find My Nearest (http://www.map.hackney.gov.uk/Find-My-Nearest/) – an interactive mapping tool using council, OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey data. This area could be of interest to developers working in data visualisation or those wanting to investigate big datasets.

Pre-call for participation and ideas

When: 15-16 November 2014
Where: Trampery Publicis Drugstore, Old Street Roundabout

Hackney Council in partnership with MiniBarLabs, Poke and Publicis invite you to take part in a special hack event to be held on 15 November 2014 at the newly opened Drugstore workspace on Old Street Roundabout.

At a time of shrinking government budgets there is a recognition within the council of a need for a different approach to the delivery of public services through technology.

The borough is the proud home of a much celebrated tech talent base. Therefore, we are reaching out to you – tech start up, software developer or tinkerer – for creative and innovative ideas, hacks and software solutions to 3 identified areas we feel can be made better:

– Online registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths
– Notifying interested parties of currently available commercial properties
– Council Open Data (we will be making a number datasets available before the hack day)

In addition to these 3 areas we will also have an Open Category. For this we invite you to send in ideas for how you think council services could be improved. This can range from council processes to the use of data, or the overall design and usability of the council’s website.

The council is committed to adopt working solutions and commission ideas.

An RSVP page and more info to follow soon. In the meantime please sign up to the MiniBarLabs mailing list or join our MiniBar Meetup Group.

We recently took a few groups of Publicis London employees through the one day CodeMaker course and they had a ball. One of them even told us that she managed to impress her 13 year old son afterwards with her new found coding skills. And as we all know its not easy to to impress a 13 year old. Well done! One a more serious note: everybody who went onto the CodeMaker course said that understanding ‘digital’, which is so often surrounded by a wall of mysterious geek talk will make their work with clients better. It is a truly amazing experience to witness a whole group going from learning the basics of programming to building their own website using HTML, CSS, Javasript and some API”s. Have a look at the video, enjoy and if you are interested in joining the CodeMaker revolution drop us a note at hello at minibarlabs.com

MiniBarLabs is proudly organising the launch of the Open Health Data Platform on the 25th of March @SkillsMatter.

If you are a developer who is interested in big data and health care come and join us at Skills Matter for the beta launch of the Open Health Data Platform (OHDP). This platform has been developed by the Connected Digital Economy Catapult and leading big data software company, Mastodon C, to provide access to public health and health related data and tools to visualise and analyse it. It’s early days for the platform and you are invited to help shape the future of health data in the UK. 

Sign up to find out more about the platform, explore the datasets, meet other data innovators and see how it can help you to create new products and services and accelerate your business.

Commissioned by the Connected Digital Economy Catapult we are looking for developers and software agencies who want to build the next generation of healthcare software products and services. Sign and up and read the details here.

In December we launched a follow on course to the CodeMaker course, because quite simply many of our attendees requested that they would like to learn more about management techniques and methodologies in software projects.

So we followed to demand and launched at Ravensbourne College the CodePlanner course, which builds on the knowledge gained in the CodeMaker course. It focusses on enhancing planning, scoping and management skills of web and mobile projects and introduces agile methods.

The driving force behind a web and tech business is often not a programmer, or software engineer however s/he can regularly have to make choices that require technical know-how. This can range from what programming framework to use – is it Ruby, Joomla, Drupal, or PhP – to deciding what programmer to hire and how to keep them on target. It is their job to translate a project from the idea stages into a realistic plan that can be implemented within budget and on time.  The course teaches how to scope projects, build concise requirement lists as well as concepts such as agile software management practises and Minimum Viable Product development. The course will also offer a section on bespoke case studies of projects participants are working on.

Topics covered will include:

• Key components of software development management
• Scoping and how to build a minimum viable product
• Where to begin the recruitment process
• What incentives start-ups have to offer
• Due diligence
• Contracts
• Outsourced v’s in-house work
• Agile software management
• Web development management tools
• Quality control
• How to deal with problems when they arise

Previous experience required:  the CodePlanner course does require a basic understanding of how websites and mobile apps work, web and information architecture. It is recommended, but not necessary, to attend the CodeMaker course to benefit best from what the CodePlanner course teaches.

We are happy to be able to announce that we will be doing another one of our ever popular and oversubscribed ‘Get the Money’ workshops on 28th of February just before our first, big MiniBar event.

E-Synergy and Minibar have teamed up with our hosts Mother, to create a series of workshops covering topics such as, ‘how to pitch your idea’, ‘an insight into the investment landscape’ and ‘the role creative branding plays in growing companies’.

What?

We are offering 20 companies the chance to attend a half day workshop at Mother. Over the course of the program you will meet a series of experienced VC’s, angels and successful entrepreneurs taking the workshops.

How?

If you want to attend please sign up here and Katie Lewis from E-Synergy – k.lewis@e-synergy.com –will be in touch with more details shortly.

Outcomes ….

Since joining our Get The Money workshops many entrepreneurs have moved on to raise investment and grow their businesses.  To name a few Vonacall have gone on to secure proof of concept funding, Zaawi were accepted on to Accelerator Academy, and Model Two Zero has raised multiple rounds of investment and is employing over 10 staff in Shoreditch.

We are very pleased to report that our CodeMaker course has been reviewed by Campaign magazine who are suggesting that as a new years resolution everybody should learn about coding.

“Delegates explain about why it is important that senior marketers and agency leaders should learn to code.

Matthew Barwell, formerly director of marketing and innovation at drinks giant Diageo, says: “Digital skills are critical…when you look to recruit a marketer you want to have people with that competency.

“In the future, that’s going to be a fundamental skill of a great marketer.”