Digital

Hackathon Day #1

April 16, 2015 by Jono Ellis No Comments

This is a post by Jono Ellis, our Social Media Manager

What is a hack day?

Today and tomorrow are “Hack Days” for the mygov.scot team. A hack day is a chance for us to work on some different projects that wouldn’t be expected to fall within our normal development process… and to work on these in an intense 2-day burst.

This will let us try out some ideas as proof-of-concept – in our last hack days a few features were developed that are now useful tools within our publishing platform. It’s a great chance for our team to break the normal flow of work and collaborate to realise fresh ideas.

What do you need for a hack day?

• A venue and attendees (we’re using our office)
• Refreshments (we’re right above the canteen and we’ll all have a trip to the pub at the end of day 2)
• Wifi (always useful!)
• Judging
• A prize!

What are we going to be working on?

Of the 30 or so ideas that were proposed 5 were carried forward:

• Rich Search – pulling rich content right into site-search pages (examples include playable videos, maps and quick answer style date information)
• Intelligent 404 – if you mistype a URL then you’ll see a 404 page – improving this by dynamically showing pages which closely match the URL that you typed
• Office timelapse – more of a fun project to capture the flow of people around the office and the life cycle of our Kanban boards
• Improving local authority pages – what publicly available data can we pull in to show on local authority pages e.g. maps, population
• Rich content checker – when content writers use the Publishing platform is there a way to automatically provide spell-checking and phrase-checking?

Stay tuned for day two of the hackathon or follow our progress via @mygovscot!

Tags: Product

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