Head over to the TechTown website for more information about this and future events.
It’s that time again – I’ll be running a hack day this weekend at the Barnsley DMC with Matt Watson (by company partner at Make Do) and Craig Burgess (from the local Genius Division agency).
Before reading any further why not just grab a ticket, they are FREE and you’ll get lunch, coffee and meet some awesome people in the sector!
The DMC in Barnsley, our home for the weekend
How did this come about?
In November last year Matt wrote about how we grew and tried to improve our local digital community by running running a local conference (TheDigitalBarn) and a Hack Day. This led to us re-connecting with some of our contacts at the local council who were looking to grow the re-engage with the local digital community (and with it the local economy).
An event seemed like the best solution to this – and so we became involved in TechTown – a European initiative to help towns and cities grow their digital communities.
The TechTown Hack Day
The first TechTown Hack Day is an opportunity to kick-off this initiative by bringing together like-minded people from our industry to create something awesome that will serve as a basis for future events all around Europe.
Everyone welcome
We’re looking for all types to attend this weekend – you don’t need to know how to code a website or use Photoshop, just show up with an idea and some passion and we’ll make sure you enjoy yourself and are involved in the event.
Tickets are FREE and the event runs for 12 hours from 8am to 8pm on Saturday 23rd of January.
What are we hacking?
We have a small set of initial ideas that are core to making this event and it’s follow-up events a success:
- The Hack Day ‘Blueprint’: Building a blueprint/manifesto for the TechTown Hack Day to share with the other towns / cities who want to run their own events
- A tool to connect people: An online tool to help locate people within the European digital community (A Geek Seeker if you will)
- Multi-lingual colab: A tool to help with issue of cross language communication and collaboration with the other TechTown’s in Europe
These are just 3 ideas that the core team will be working on over the course of the 12-hour day, we’ll open up the floor to new ideas and connect people into teams so everyone can get hacking on whatever they feel the most passionate about.
How will the day look?
It’s a 12-hour day but there isn’t much room for rest:
- 08:00
- Coffee / Registration
- 09:00
- Idea building and introductions
- 10:00
- Team building and setting goals
- 10:30
- Hacking begins
- 12:00
- Lunch and status update
- 13:00
- Status update and help requests
- 15:00
- Coffee break
- 18:00
- Presentation start
- 20:00
- End – Post-Hack Party
The day is also pretty flexible – anyone can drop-in and out at any time, just make sure you have a ticket.
That’s all for now – hope to see you there 🙂
