Culture Hack London 2011

Date: 15/16 January 2011
Location: Wieden + Kennedy London

Culture Hack London helped facilitate fast-prototyping and project development for national and regional cultural theatres, museums and galleries – spanning the worlds of film, theatre, dance, science and visual art.

It produced 2484 hours of volunteer software developer time over the weekend and created a space for discussion and debate about open data across cultural and commercial sectors.

The event debrief saw people from arts, culture and technology sectors create personal pledges towards open data and culture/tech collaboration.

Culture Hack Day London 2011 was conceived and produced by the Royal Opera House, led by Rachel Coldicutt. As part of Wieden + Kennedy Inspire, Wieden + Kennedy London provided the space, and the event was supported by Google, Arts Council England and the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network.

Culture Hack Day Report

Download the Culture Hack Day Report.pdf

Open publication – Free publishing – More hack

What happened?

Lots of developers came along and loads of cultural organisations shared data, including The Guardian, Welsh National Opera, Mute, DCMS, National Maritime Museum, Watershed, Global Data Point, Crafts Council, Culture Grid, Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, BBC Archive, Proboscis, UK Film Council and the Royal Opera House.

As well as a weekend of hacking, there was an afternoon of inspiring provocations and encouraging debate. Hosted by Simon Hopkins, metadata champion, Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network, we heard talks by Tom Uglow, Creative Director, Google and YouTube, Europe, Clare Reddington, Director, iShed and Pervasive Media Studio, Leila Johnston, author, blogger & comedy writer, Tom Armitage, Creative Technologist, BERG, Tom Dunbar, Producer, Hut V, Matthew Somerville, developer, Theatricalia, Nick Harkaway, author and blogger for FutureBook, and Chris Thorpe, ArtFinder. You can read some notes about the talks on the Meshed Media blog and from Mia Ridge.

What Was Made?

Dan W, @iamdanw, made http://whenshouldivisit.iamdanw.com
Mark James, @markjames, and Andrew Lowther, @andrewlowther, made http://cultureapp.dyndns.org
Mark James, @markjames, with data from Matthew Somerville, @dracos, made http://mark.james.name/tescofresco/
Matthew Somerville, @dracos, and Clare Lovell, @clarelovell, made http://pepysshows.co.uk/
Luke Blaney, @lucas42, Richard Lewis and Jamie Forth worked on a theatre ontology
http://lukeblaney.co.uk/semweb/theatre
Adam Groves, @theuncommon, made
http://haikuardian.tumblr.com/
Arran Ross-Paterson @arranrp, Daniel Knell @danielknell, Franco Milazzo @eyetie, Morena Fiore @mfujica, made http://moviestub.co.uk
Stef Lewandowski, @stef, made absolutely loads of things, including http://github.com/stefl/culturegrid, http://culturegrid.heroku.com, http://culturegridapp.heroku.com, http://filmflexicon.heroku.com
Dan Jones @ideoforms, Liam McNamara @laimjjmcnamara and Ben Fields @alsothings made https://github.com/ideoforms/subvertle
(which will be live soon)
Brendan Quinn @brendanquinn made http://www.clueful.com.au/culturehackday/
Roderick Hodgson @roderickhodgson made Altfilm
Adam Groves @TheUncommon made Haikuardian
Ben Firshman @bfirsh made BBC Haiku Player
Craft Matters? Craft Matters hack by Becky Stewart @theleadingzero
Caius Durling, @caius, Dominic Hodgson, @thehodge, and Tom Scott, @tomscott, made a museum in Minecraft using CultureGrid data

——————————–

Enormous Thanks to:

Everyone who has spared time to help shape, support and encourage the event
Matthew Somerville, Kim Plowright and Chris Thorpe
All of our speakers
Donna, Dan, Sam & Gavin from W&K
Kevin from Barcamp London
Our very helpful helpers – Alison Coward, Paul Spear, Vanessa Proudman
Hackers!, The Wrap Paper, Plan B Studio, ArtFinder, Crafts Council, Welsh National Opera, ROH, Proboscis, The Guardian, Hide&Seek and Elgato for prizes and goodie bag donations
Brewdog for donating the beer
QED Productions for loaning us the PA equipment for free
deanvipond.com for the logo
Erin Maguire for project managing the event so efficiently