Waltham Forest Hackathon 2018

I’m Riley Ramone and I created Ticketlab.co.uk with my co-founder Rebecca Breen (Becs) around 6 years ago to help sell tickets for a charity we volunteer for called Get it Loud in Libraries that puts of gigs in libraries. Essentially, the existing providers were expensive and tricky to use, so we built our own.
When we first moved to Waltham Forest just over 3 years ago from Camden, we noticed that events information was scattered between several local publications, with no central online place to find them all. With a very engaged local crowd on social media, I set up walthamstuff.com as a free community resource to allow people to post the events they’re organising and going to (even the ones not ticketed through Ticketlab!), which automatically shares them with Twitter, Facebook and the Waltham Forest Echo.

Last year I organised the first #WFDigital Hackathon overnight in the Town Hall (details here). We created a map of the cultural venues, businesses and community resources in the borough to help build awareness of culture prior to our being selected as the Borough of Culture. This year, we’re building on that work to allow anyone to contribute to the map and update information. All the work we’ve done has been open-sourced (so anyone can use it – find the Git repo here) and we already have plans to help integrate the data into services provided by the council, local community organisations and even a big project that the Mayor of London’s office is launching in the New Year.

Throughout the day local businesses, including Health Works, DXW Digital and Community Waltham Forest popped in to lend a hand. They lent their expertise and data to students (including the project pitch winners and runners-up from the previous day’s Waltham Forest Careers Expo at Leyton Orient which was organised by Techmix), budding local entrepreneurs and residents who wanted to help out.

We also had a few VIPs pop down to say hi: Waltham Forest’s Director of Digital & ICT Paul Neville, WF Councillor Liaquat Ali MBE JP, Leader of the council Clare Coghill, Waltham Forest Council’s Chief Executive Martin Esom and The Chief Digital Officer from the Mayor of London’s office, Theo Blackwell.

There was a great sense of co-operation in the room and we made some great progress. By the end of the day we’d managed to open up the map to allow submissions, and very nearly got the edit functionality working (which I have since completed).

Please check out all our hard work at maps.walthamstuff.com