Fwd: Free Wigan 'The Deal' Civic Hackathon - Leigh Hackspace 5th/6th March

[Marcus Baw]

Dear

​OpenDataManchester​

Apologies for hijacking your list to advertise a local event, I'm hoping it will be of interest to some of you.

I'm the director of Leigh Hackspace, a makerspace in Leigh, Lancashire - it's about 10 miles from the centre of Manchester heading west-ish if you never heard of 

​Leigh​

- many haven't :-)

We're running a free civic Hackathon on behalf of Wigan Council, aimed at citizens of Wigan Borough, and inviting them to come and pitch their ideas to the audience, who will then form into teams to 'hack' on these ideas over the weekend. I'm sure I'm teaching Grandma to suck eggs here; you know what a Hackathon is about.

Anyway, it's a great way to enhance your CV, make connections & network, give back to the local area, especially if you live in or around Wigan Borough. We have some tech companies getting involved too, so it's also a good way to raise your profile and get noticed

​.

We've got involvement of the Council's own Data people, and one of the hacks planned is to catalogue the available Wigan-relevant Open Data, and also to make it usable in other projects - for example by getting the data out of PDFs and spreadsheets and into structured data form or possibly even behind a REST API.

We massively need devs/techies/programmers/coders

​ and Open Data enthusiasts to come along and help out. Level of expertise is not important, just a willingness to get stuck in and enjoy a 'do-acracy' based Unconference-type event. A lot of our own team at Hackspace are coming along and helping out, so if there are any Manchester Open Data people that would like to join us, the booking link is:

https://thedealhackday.eventbrite.co.uk where there is also FAQ, schedule and other info.

Flyer is attached

Please feel free to share among any other communities in the area too!

Thanks

Marcus