YRS Brighton – meet the team!

Young Rewired State kicked off yesterday and the Brighton team have already come up with two really solid ideas for how to show Government what it could be doing better, with open data.

Harry, Lawrence and Damon spent the morning talking through examples of data sets and previous YRS creations before getting stuck into creating their ideas in the afternoon.

We’ve also set up a Brighton outpost twitter feed, which we’ll all be posting to – follow it for the latest on what we’re up to.

So, meet the team, in their own words…

Lawrence Job

Hi there, I’m @lawrencejob. I freelance under the better known brand GridFusions, and love cloud/web development. I have attended a few Rewired State events before, and always leave wanting more – I enjoy socialising, coding and the feeling of changing the country. Albeit slowly. Last year my team won an award with TfHell, and a few weeks later the impact was felt. And this year we’ll do even better.

Harry Rickards

Hi, I’m Harry. I know a bit of PHP, HTML/CSS and C, and want to learn a lot more (PHP). I signed up for Young Rewired State to get some more experience, and hopefully make something cool that’s useful to someone. I’ve had quite a bit of experience in open source projects, e.g I’m part of the Debian Multimedia Packaging Team and the contact point between that team and upstream (the developer of the program) for LiVES (a piece of video editing software).

Damon Hayhurst

Hi, I’m Damon, I’m 16. My hobbies also include DJing and playing rugby. I came here to learn more about web development and design. Also as a form of work experience to improve my CV. I’m very much interested in social networking and how it affects the media as a whole. I hope what I will get out of the week will benefit my skills in web development.

But what about the ideas…

Idea one: Books.gov.uk
To improve use of local libraries, particularly amongst young people, we want to bring book availability, recommendations and personal borrowing behaviour into people’s social networks.

_ socialising the library experience and personal borrowing data.
_ providing reading recommendations based on online conversations.
_ reducing paper waste by digitalising notifications and warnings.
_ centralising the library system so anyone can borrow anything from anywhere (and therefore the data) – ok so this is a big ask.

TubeSmart
Using real-time ticket barrier data, we want to produce a heat map of train/tube stations to help travellers work out which stations they should avoid using at particular times. Using recorded trends over the year, and local events, we can give advice on planning future journeys.

Stay tuned for updates from the team, and the latest on progress…