As the culmination of the first week of our community-powered effort to build our own website for Birmingham City Council, the BCC DIY Hack Day was a real show of how much an informal group of people can now achieve in a short space of time.
This is a collection of some of the stuff that’s since been put online about the day.
Please leave other links in the comments and I will add them here.
The site itself
BCCDIY.com
The source code
Everything we have built is now open source, and you can download and play with the code if you know Ruby on Rails (could be a good reason to learn?)
The BCCDIY project on Github.
The WIKI
A fair few pages on the BCCDIY wiki were put together during the day, along with our thoughts on what we want to know about based on a “Near Me” search, what should go on the home page. Lots to look at there.
Mindmaps
Simon Redgrave made this rather wonderful mindmap for how the “Near Me” functionality should work. Click the nodes to expand them.
Videos
Lots of people had cameras and were filming the day. Here are just some of them:
An overview of BCC DIY, by Stef from Jon Hickman on Vimeo.
At the end of Week Two, @citizensheep interviewed me about the site.
Audio
Some of us were using AudioBoo and other podcasting tools to record and publish audio:
BCCDIY Hack Day Thoughts by Rasga
Paul Hadley talks to Al from Newcastle City Council web team
Flickr
We had around 2000 photos tagged “BCCDIY” on Flickr during the day. Most of those tags were added by us, with the idea being the photos would be invited to appear on the site. We also have a BCCDIY group set up to collect images that would be particularly suited to appearing without context on the homepage. Please join and submit your photos and hopefully they’ll start appearing.
Tweets
There’s been a lot of noise on Twitter under the hashtag #bccdiy
Blog posts
Volunteers build ‘improved’ version of Birmingham City Council’s website
The MA Social Media students were there - Jon Hickman published a short blog post
What local council web teams can learn from BCCDIY by Pezholio (who couldn’t get there because of car trouble :/)
Do it yourself Birmingham by Martin
A six hour diary of how BCCDIY unfolded by Paul Hadley
Alex Gamela blogs with video
That’s it for now…
more coming along as I find it.
Around the same time
- The search is on – we’re hiringWriting · 2009
- Ruby GEOAPIProjects · 2009
- London C-all-in-gWriting · 2009
- Black To Comm — Alphabet 1968Music · 2009
Earlier in writing: What should the Library of Birmingham be and do?. Later in writing: Guardian: Digital technology for public services and communities could make bottom up more effective than top down.
About this piece
First published .