2017 Manchester Hackout

Coordinated by Transport For Greater Manchester (TfGM) in collaboration with:

Background

Youth For Public Transport (Y4PT) Foundation, with the support of the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) and its members, and following the long-standing tradition of Y4PT Youth Lab series, is promoting the organization of local transport hackathons around the world, by combining the best of boundless human creativity and the benefits of current information and communications technologies (ICTs) in collaborative environments, with the aim of advancing transport sector towards sustainability.

Winners from each local transport hackathon will join other Canada-based hackers at the 1st Y4PT Global Transport Hackathon Montreal 2017 (https://www.y4pt.org/projects/hackathon) in the framework of the 62th UITP Global Public Transport Summit Montreal 2017 – the world’s oldest and leading sustainable transport event – to contest in a final round for unveiling the world’s best ground-breaking transport solutions.

More than 20 major cities around the world are hosting the first local transport hackathons. Other cities are also welcome to join.

Different local stakeholders such as universities, youth groups, ICT companies, transport operators, authorities, start-up mentors and hackers are called to collaborate with Y4PT and to be part of the world’s first ever global transport hackathon.

Everyone is invited to get on board. This is an one-off opportunity to show to your audience and users how important is for you to support this kind of events where innovation and creativity is putting forward new ICT-related solutions to boost both the private sector business performance and the public sector policy efficacy, and thus to unlock new opportunities to expand, diversify and renew your organization’s portfolio of products and services.

What is Hackout:Manchester ?

A Hackathon, with a difference: it is not a race/competition, more of a relationship building event. It is attached to MULTIPLE innovation programmes, including Cisco’s CityVerve Open Innovation Programme, Book of the Futures ‘Manchester Innovation’ Programme, UITP’s Youth for Public Transport Programme, Manchester Science Parks Acceleration Programme, TravelSpirit’s HackOut Franchise.

Our target audience is a highly inclusive one – with an action to amend the current draft schedule to remove the need for ‘overnight hacking’ to overcome issues around potential involvement of under 18’s and other groups put off the prospect of ‘hacking all night’.

Our expectation is for there to be an optional, and fully inclusive afternoon event on Friday 17th, that will be focused on key note talks from challenge/programme owners to develop the challenges ahead of the weekend. This event will require a separate EventBrite push. Anyone attending the afternoon session is invited to drop-in over the weekend.
However, anyone registered for the Hackout weekend is required to attend the full duration – to ensure consistency of team input.
We need to target a full range of skill-sets: Idea Generators, Problem Owners, Business Professionals, Designers and Coders. In addition to ‘amateur coders’ we will aim to secure (potentially by contract, or by organisational donation of staff time) professional coders to support each team in developing a solution over the weekend. We will be exploiting various assets, to provide a ‘live living lab’ of code projects, through the BT DataHub, Iotic Labs ‘Iotic Space’ platform and other assets made available through Cisco’s Cityverve programme.

Success will be measured by the level of ‘buzz’ created, informing the attendees about industry challenges and the Mobility as a Service opportunity, informing attendees about the benefits of open source software development, the creation of enduring relationships and some tangible software/IoT demonstrations. Our target is to have circa 40-60 attendees.

Contact

Further information on the 2017 Manchester Hackout at https://www.travelspirit.foundation/  .

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