The Saturday before last, Digital Birmingham were happy to sponsor Andrew McKenzie’s Mapitude day at Aquila TV. This followed on from the successful Hackitude event held there in December last year. Both of these events are based on the idea that if data is released to the public then we will be excited enough by it to create stuff.
Andrew put together a really interesting programme of events over the day, under his strapline of it being a “workshop to develop understanding and practical collaboration between web developers and mappers.” There was one group of people getting excited and making things and another group who were exchanging presentations about mapping.
I wasn’t able to make the event, but speaking to Andrew afterwards he was really enthusiastic about what was achieved. The people getting excited included Chris Taggart of Openly Local and Stuart Harrison of Lichfield – Open Data who focused on the application building, along with Gavin Wray, Michael Grimes and Heidi Blanton who worked on locating the data and constructing the webpage that uses the application to display it.
