Have your say on UKGovHack 2016

When we first announced UKGovHack three weeks ago, we were aiming to do two things. The first was to continue great conversations from events like UKGovCamp and Sprint 16. The second was to diversify the civic technology scene as we had seen first hand the benefits of an expanded audience at Accountability Hack 2015. In doing so, we want to engage with civil and crown servants who have less technical confidence, as well as open up the community to technical folk who have little knowledge or experience in the public sector. By bringing together a more varied audience, we hope to open a brilliant community to more people, while bringing different and various perspectives to the table as we look to solve common challenges in the public sector.

If you missed it before, UKGovHack is a hackathon and conference mashup taking place on 2nd & 3rd of April at the NAO in London. The two streams will run simultaneously, creating an awesome, flexible environment that is accessible to everyone with an interest in the public sector or civic technology. Attendees can move between streams, curating their perfect event as we explore different themes and prototype solutions to improve the public sector.

Today we are totally overwhelmed as we announce that we’ve completely run out of our biggest batch of tickets — those for people aged 18 and over — while we only have a handful left for younger people. The demand was more than we ever expected, and it feels great to know we’re putting out an event that people feel excited by.

The conference stream — have your say

With this, we are ready to kick off the next stage of planning for the event — which is now just a month away! We want attendees to tell us what they would like to see to make the event as interesting and useful as possible — and we’ll do our damnedest to make it happen. Today we want to invite the community’s feedback on the conference stream.

We’ve put together some of our ideas in this document, which we’d love you to comment on. If you have any ideas for new sessions, whether they’re talks, workshops or discussions, tell us what you want to see here. We’ll be locking down content on Monday 7 March.

Call for sponsorship — pay what you want

One of our experiments as part of this event comes in the form of our flat sponsorship. Any organisation or individual can sponsor ANY amount and all receive the same thing — no tiers, no specified amounts. Post-event, we’ll write up our findings and publish our finances for everyone to see.

If you would like to sponsor the event, get in touch and let us know. We don’t bite ;)

That’s all for today, folks

We’re so super excited to be able to run this event for a community that we love so much. Now that we’re out of tickets, if you can no longer make it, please remember to cancel yours so someone on the waitlist can enjoy the weekend.

If you have ANY questions, just ping us an email at ukgovhack@rebellabs.co.uk and we’ll be straight on it.

Much love,

Team Rebel