- Applicant: Kevin Lewis
- Funding agree: £500
- Where/when: National Audit Office, London – 2/3 April 2016
- Tickets: on EventBrite
Description of the proposed Event: This is a conference/hackathon mashup which is aiming to diversify more technical civic technology events. The conference will run on Saturday only and the hackathon throughout the weekend. The free ticket will get users into both halves and they can be as fluid and flexible as they want, moving between the two.
The aim is to allow less technical civil/crown servants to learn about (and play with) technology with the conference, as well as blow off steam in discussion sessions and interact with non-government users. The secondary audience is for those who are already technical but lack knowledge of the public sector and the challenges faced. For this we will use our connections with many student tech societies around the country.
Giuseppe Sollazzo will be acting as our community volunteer, checking in on both hackers and conference delegates, connecting and introducing them as he sees fit for everyone to have the most productive time possible. Our aim is to lower the barrier to entry to both tech and the theme of the public sector by having the groups interact, rather than existing separately.
More info: http://ukgovhack.com/files/pack.pdf
What they would use the funding for: This money will help deliver the event. We are just in the process of finalising our budget but we estimate that the event will cost us no less than £2500 to run, with our team’s golden aim at £10000.
The minimum immediate costs are food and tshirts (offered as part of our one pay-what-you-want sponsorship package). Anything over this will improve the quality of both of these items, as well as allowing us to better resource the event – including printing more collateral for the event.
About them: Personally, I got involved in civic tech in 2011 at age 14 at the first Parliament Hack weekend. Ever since then, my particular niche of geekdom has been government – attending a load of community events and delivering, or helping deliver, loads of hackathons including National Hack the Government and Accountability Hack.
Along with Julia Higginbottom, Nat Higginbottom and Kate McDonald, we are a core team of four people who have been involved in delivering projects for the public sector for a number of years. We really enjoyed running public-sector hackathons, but the audience was largely the same as the work ‘hackathon’ and associated materials make them incredibly daunting for those with less technical skill. We wanted to see this change, and think that UKGovHack is a great way to experiment in a ways to achieve this.