Mydex at Spring Hackathon 2013: Building apps for local communities 27 & 28th April 2013

This week we posted our developer advocate’ (@mrchrisadams) thoughts on the NHS Scotland Hackday.

This weekend, Chris is attending another exciting hackathon to build apps for local communities (#hackcentral). This event is organised by Milverton Wallace (Hackathon Central — @HackathonCentrl), who also took part in the ODI midata hackathon last year.

The objective of this hackathon is to encourage developers to compete and collaborate to create web and mobile apps to:

• Make local public information more usable and accessible to all in the community
• Enable easy retrieval of information from council websites by non-technical users
• Create better online and mobile links between communities and local public services

Mydex API
We will be providing our API for the hackathon and Chris will be giving the briefing on behalf of Mydex.

Judging criteria
The prototypes produced by developers will be judged according to the following criteria:

1. Local Impact: Does the app provide easy access to relevant content and enable better links between local residents and official data collecting agencies?
2. User Experience and Presentation: Is the app simple, well-designed, and easy to use by non technical users?
3. Accessibility: Is the app usable by and useful to people with disabilities?
4. Sustainability: How likely is the app to survive beyond the hackathon? Is this a viable app for final production and use? Is the idea promising enough to warrant sustained development and attention?

To find out more about the event, visit http://hackathoncentral.com and look out for our follow-up blog post on the event.

Until then, have a great weekend!