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About midata?

The Government’s Midata programme seeks to give people access to their personal data in an electronic format, as part of their consumer empowerment strategy Better Choices: Better Deals.

More and more data is being generated which contains information about the choices that we make. Businesses use this data to develop new products and services, but so far consumers have not been able to access it or use it easily.

By giving consumers the ability to obtain their data electronically, Midata gives power back to consumers. Accessing data about purchasing and consumption behaviour can help consumers to make better decisions in the future.

Last summer, BIS recently held a consultation on a proposal to strengthen the Midata programme by creating a new consumer right to access personal data.

More Information

• Giving consumers the midata touch
• The midata vision of consumer empowerment
• Consumer Empowerment: Personal Data

Event Information

Location

The hackathon is being held in the ODI’s offices, on the 3rd floor at 65 Clifton St, London, EC2A 4JE.

Schedule

Saturday 17th November

Venue will remain open for all-night hacking!

Sunday 18th November

What to bring?

Bring a laptop to work on, and make sure to remember your power cables and any adapters required for external displays. Wifi will be available, but if you want to use a wired Ethernet connection, bring a cable for that as well.

The venue will be open all night, but doesn’t have much to sleep on, so if you want to grab a powernap, bring a rollmat or something to make the floor a bit more comfortable.

The Challenges

The Midata scheme opens up exciting possibilities for all sorts of new applications. Here are a few of the areas we think you’ll find most fruitful:

• Personal Financial Management: With data from bank accounts, loans, credit cards, mortgages and pensions, how could you help people better manage their money?
• Carbon Footprint: If you could get electricity, gas, transport, and fuel purchases all in one place, how could you improve carbon footprinting, and help people save energy?
• Purchase management: Stores collect information on everything you buy. How could this data help people understand their purchasing habits, manage their previous purchases, or improve their relationship with retailers and advertisers?
• Health and Fitness: How could you use personal data to help people lead healthier lives? What can you work out from exercise, food purchases, and other financial information?

If you would like to work on your ideas ahead of the event itself, you can share and discuss on our Hacker League page.

Be A Data Donor

The Midata Hackathon is about exploring how different types of personal data can be combined to create new value and new applications. As the initiative is still in the early stages, most companies don't yet have APIs for it, so we need to collect the information manually. That means we need data donors, willing to let our attendees use their energy, health, retail, and telecoms data to build new and exciting apps!

If you'd be happy to donate some of your information to help define the future of personal data, sign up to become a data donor. We'll then be in touch about how you can go about getting the right information and where to send it. We will of course anonymise the data, so it won't be identifiable to you personally.

Judging & Prizes

All teams will do a presentation on Sunday afternoon, showing what they’ve created. The projects will be judged by a distinguished panel, including:

• Nigel Shadbolt, The Open Data Institute
• Kieran Kumaria, 10 Downing St.
• Alan Mitchell, Ctrl-Shift

We have some great prizes on offer in each of the categories above. Outstanding projects will also have the opportunity to work with the ODI to turn their ideas into commercial reality.

Data & APIs

We’ll have a selection of sample data for you to use in your apps over the weekend, including:

• Personal details
• Domestic circumstances
• Energy use
• Telecommunications
• Purchase history
• Loyalty cards
• Banking & Credit Cards
• Transport

You are of course welcome to use any other data that you have access to. Check back later for details on how to access the data.

During the weekend, we’d also like to know what data isn’t available, that you’d need to create your ideal apps. There are big gaps at the moment, so it’s OK to pretend that you have data that doesn’t exist; we’d just like to know what’s missing so we can help companies to release data that is useful.

Useful APIs & Services

There are a number of services and APIs which you might find useful when building your apps.

FAQs

Q: ‘Hackathon’? That sounds a bit dodgy. Are you breaking into our computers?

A: Not at all. In geek parlance, a ‘hack’ is an innovative solution to a problem, often thrown together in a very rapid way. Hackdays give developers and designers a space in which to explore a problem and come up with innovative new solutions.

Q: What should I make?

A: You can come along and build anything you like! It could be something you already have in mind, or maybe you’ll meet some new people on the day and make something with them. It’s up to you! There will be some short presentations at the beginning to spark some ideas, so don’t worry if you don’t know what you’re making beforehand.

Q: Who owns the results?

A: You do! You can release it open source, keep it to yourself, start a business with it, whatever you want. If you join a team with others, it’s up to you to sort out the IP issues between you. We make no claim to the IP generated during the hackday, but we will talk about it and might use images of it (unless you specifically ask us not to).

Q: What happens to my hack afterwards?

A: Again, that’s up to you. There will be opportunities to talk to staff from the ODI and other organisations about possible avenues for further development, and obviously being one of the winners makes that all the more likely! If you don’t intend to take your hack forwards (or maybe even if you do), we’d encourage you to make it open source so that perhps others can.