By Philip John, Journal Local. This has been cross-posted on the Journal Local blog.

It may be a tiny city but Lichfield has shown that it has some great talent at the Hacks and Hackers Hack Day.

Sponsored by Lichfield District Council and Lichfield-based Journal Local, the day was held at the George Hotel and attended by a good selection of local developers and journalists – some coming from much further afield.

Once the introductions were done and we’d all contributed a few ideas the work got started and five teams quickly formed around those initial thoughts.

The first two teams decided to look into Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and Information Asset Registers (IARs). The first of these scraped information from 470 councils to show which of these published information about PFIs. The results showed that only 10% of councils actually put out any details of PFIs, highlighting a lack of openness in that area.

Also focused on PFIs was the ‘PFI wiki’ project which scraped the Partnerships UK database of PFIs and re-purposed it to allow deeper interrogation, such as by region and companies. It clearly paves the way for an OpenCharities style site for PFIs.

Future care needs was the focus of the third team who mapped care homes along with information on ownership, public vs private status and location. The next step, they said, is to add the number of beds and match that to the needs of the population based on demographic data, giving a clearer view of whether the facilities exist to cater for the future care needs in the area.

A Lichfield-related project was the focus of the fourth group who aimed to create a comprehensive guide to events going on in Lichfield District. Using about four or five scrapers, they produced a site that collated all the events listing sites serving Lichfield into one central site with a search facility. The group also spawned a new Hacks/Hackers group to continue their work.

Last but not least, the fifth group worked on flood warning information. By scraping the Environment Agency web site they were able to display on a map, the river level gauges and the flood warning level so that at a glance it’s possible to see the water level in relation to the flood warning limit.

So after a long day Lizzie Thatcher and Rita Wilson from Lichfield District Council joined us to judge the projects. They came up with a clever matrix of key points to rate the projects by and decided to choose the ‘what’s on’ and ‘flood warning’ projects as joint winners, who each share a prize of £75 in Amazon vouchers.

The coveted ScraperWiki mug also went to the ‘what’s on’ project for their proper use of ScraperWiki to create good quality scrapers.

Pictures from the event by Nick Brickett. Click through to view slideshow…