A varied crowd turned out for yesterday’s hack day hosted by nti Leeds, and also sponsored by Guardian Open Platform and Guardian Local and Leeds Trinity Centre for Journalism. It included participants from the city council and regional newspapers, independent bloggers, designers and computer programmers – with all different kinds of experience.

With the introduction over, the competition began, fuelled by the usual Scraperwiki promise of pizza and beer; and Amazon vouchers for the winners – who would be decided by our three judges, Sarah Hartley, editor of Guardian Local, Linda Broughton, head of nti Leeds, and Richard Horsman, associate principal lecturer at Leeds Trinity Centre for Journalism.

Five groups formed around different areas of interest, but all with a Leeds focus. Brownfield Research, by Greg Brant, Rebecca Whittington, Jon Eland and Tom Mortimer-Jones was about discovering the past, present and planned future of brownfield sites using scrapes of planning applications and change of use applications combined with web-chat and related documents. It also aimed to include history of industrial disease and accidents and contamination on site.

Leeds Planning Map by Catherine O’Connor (@journochat), Elizabeth Sanderson (@Lizziesanderson), James Rothschild (@jrpmedia), John Baron (@GdnLeeds), Karl Schneider (@karlschneider), Matt Jones (@matt_jones86) allowed users to view all planning decisions in Leeds colour coded by accepted or refused applications (some of the team pictured below).

Find Me by software developer Marcus Houlden (@mhoulden) built a geolocation web application that displays current location, address, postcode, and links to nearest bus stops. He also started adding Yorkshire Water roadworks data.

The Leeds Pulse team scraped Live Journal data to produce a web application, built on Django, demonstrating negative and positive blogging attitudes across Leeds – drawing from 8,500 blog posts. It categorised “love, like or good” as positive, and “hate, bad or meh” as negative. The judges certainly weren’t ‘meh’ about it, and chose it as the runner-up.

Leeds Uncut, however, scooped the overall prize (team pictured above). Suzanne McTaggart, Amna Kaleem (@amnakaleem), Nick Crossland (@ncrossland), Michael Brunton-Spall (@bruntonspall) with some help from developer Martin Dunschen created a map showing the eight constituencies in Leeds to highlight how they are being affected by spending cuts and redundancies.

They also looked at job vacancies in each of the constituencies, to identify whether the creation of new jobs is offsetting the doom and gloom caused by spending cuts and job losses. Different shades of colour in the form of an “economic health thermometer” gave a visually effective overview of which constituencies are suffering the most and least.

The data for the project was gathered from job websites, news websites, the Guardian’s Cutswatch page and the Office of National Statistics, which provides figures on how many people are claiming unemployment benefit/jobseekers allowance each month, giving an indication of the number of new redundancies.

The three judges … were unanimous in deciding that the worthy winners had successfully collated trusted data and compiled an easy to use map visualisation.

… commented judge Sarah Hartley, who has written this account of the beginning, middle and end of the day.

£250 worth of Amazon.co.uk vouchers will be split up among the winners and runners up. An extra prize for the best scraper work, chosen by Scraperwiki’s Julian Todd, went to Matt Jones, who will continue to maintain the planning data scraper.

With thanks to all our sponsors and helpers mentioned above, and additionally Leeds Trinity’s Catherine O’Connor and Imran Ali.

Twitter conversation was via the #hhhleeds tag, and see below for a visualisation of some of the geotagged tweets (courtesy of remote onlooker Tony Hirst, @psychemedia):

You can find a Twitter list of delegates at this link here:

• http://twitter.com/#!/ScraperWiki/leeds-hacks-hackers

More links to be added as we spot them and photographs are coming… Please email judith at scraperwiki.com with more material, or leave links in the comment section below. I’d especially like to add in links to scrapers and data sets, so people can see how the projects were built.

Want to get involved? We’re still on tour! If you’d like to sponsor an event please get in touch with aine@scraperwiki.com.

• More pictures at this link.
  

It’s the fifth stop on the ScraperWiki tour: we’ll be going to Manchester on Friday October 15th and Dublin on Tuesday 16th November as part of the Innovation Dublin festival. We’re currently negotiating venues and dates in Cardiff, Belfast and Glasgow.

What? Hacks and Hackers Hack Day Leeds

When? Thursday October 28th 2010 from 9.30 am to 7.30 pm

Where? At nti Leeds, Old Broadcasting House, 148 Woodhouse Lane, LS2 9EN Leeds (on Google Maps)

Who is it for? We hope to attract ‘hacks’ and ‘hackers’ from all different types of backgrounds: people from big media organisations, as well as individual online publishers and freelancers.

How much? Absolutely free, thanks to our sponsors, Guardian Open Platform and Guardian Local and Leeds Trinity Centre for Journalism for making the event possible, and our hosts nti Leeds at Old Broadcasting House.

Refreshments, lunch and evening snacks will be all be provided.

NB: We’re still seeking sponsors to get involved. If you think your organisation might be interested please contact aine [at] scraperwiki.com. Or get in touch with any other questions!

What happens on the day? The aim is to show journalists how to use programming and design techniques to create online news stories and features; and vice versa, to show programmers how to find, develop, and polish stories and features. All sorts of data was scraped and played with at our past events: in Liverpool, projects included mashes of police, libraries and courts data. Birmingham saw lots of health-related projects, as well as scraping of political party donor and leisure centre information.

This four minute video from Liverpool gives you a flavour of the kind of projects that can be developed.

Armed with their laptops and WIFI, journalists and developers will be put into teams of around four to develop their ideas, with the aim of finishing final projects that can be published and shared publicly. Each team will then present their project to the whole group. Overall winners will receive a prize at the end of the day.

• Book your place now, via this page: http://hackdayleeds.eventbrite.com/

With thanks to our sponsors:

Want to support us too? Contact aine [at] scraperwiki.com.