Competitions
Please note to enter for a competition, please visit the Teams page, and in the team page indicate which competition you are entering. You may be able to enter more than one competition depending on the rules of each competition.
A list of all competitions with prizes can be found on the DevXS website, but there are a few more ideas for things to challenge you here...
DevCSI
The DevCSI Competition is an overall prize to the best ideas that make a difference to University life for students and / or staff.
- First Prize: £250
- Second Prize: £150
- Third Prize: £100
Prizes will be awarded as amazon vouchers
LNCD
£250 in vouchers for the best use of data.lincoln.ac.uk. May be combined with external data sources and APIs.
3 x £50 Amazon vouchers for clearly defined ideas around the use of data.lincoln.ac.uk combined with external data sources/APIs.
1 x £100 voucher for the work that best demonstrates attention to accessibility and inclusivity.
We'll be judging the work on accessibility according to these three criteria for inclusion.
Public Platforms
A £100 bounty for innovative work relating to scholarly publishing.
Library activity data
The University of Lincoln Library (http://www.library.lincoln.ac.uk/) are sponsoring a £250 Amazon voucher prize (5 x £50 vouchers), which will be awarded to the team making the best use of library activity data as part of the application(s) they develop over the weekend. See the Data page on the wiki for examples of freely-available library activity data.
OCLC
Something on their library data
School of Computing
The Lincoln School of Computer Science Computing Education Group (CEG) would like to offer a £200 prize for work which challenges gender stereotypes in computing, gaming etc.
Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre (LiSC)
A social app/use of social APIs (£200). Read about the work of LiSC and think about how your work relates to theirs (social/open data/HCI).
This award will go to the best project addressing any of these four themes:
- Applications that annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world (i.e., serendipity), rather than limiting them
- Apps that support social interaction at hack weekends
- Apps that use university data in subversive or cheeky ways
- Mashing open government data sets (data.gov.uk) with university data
Smart Research Frameworks
University of Southampton
Design and build an application that uses our "health and safety dataset" to provide a service to university students and/or staff.
The winner will receive £150 in Amazon or iTunes gift vouchers.
Three runners-up will each receive £50 in Amazon or iTunes gift vouchers.
- for more information see Safe Mate, Nicely Done!
The dataset is available from http://bit.ly/vTC1Yh
OKFN
Some text here
Miscellaneous
Reverse Engineer Reading Lists
The ability to reverse engineer reading lists would be useful. (e.g. you should be able to take a book (or e-resource) and identify which reading lists it's on, which courses it's supporting?)That way you'd have an another perspective on your literature search besides class numbers and reference lists.
Variation on “6 degrees of separation
Objective design an application that will link 2 people in less than 6 hops. Links must be found in a “web artefact” (web page / document alt tag to images etc.. ) any social network links would be considered out of bounds as would links found in any directories.
So for example in looking to link author A and B a simple Amazon search could be constructed that would return a set of results that contained both, this in its self would not be considered a valid link, but if there was an item in that result that cited them as co author on a book would.
Marks awarded for :-
- Finding references to people in web artefacts
- Resolves or reduce the risk of mistaken identities, ie the John Smith rather than any old John Smith ,
- Assessing the risk of mistaken ids. And accuracy of the link chain .
- Checking that search remains in bounds ie discounts social nw links and directories.
- Follow on from above: Identify individuals who are major nodes on the linked network that is “in play ” in part 1.
Device auditing
An app that uses GPS, and barcodes to allow fast auditing of devices around the university. Throw it all into a a database, and have the ability to overlay building information, exporting from the DB into 3rd party tools would be essential. Altitude would be nice as well, then you could work out what floor devices are on. Barcode support for getting device details, and for asset tags as well.
All-in-one phone setup
Suggested by a student...
An app for the iPhone where it would automatically set up the university timetable with the iCal and set up the email to sync to the iPhone inbox. All this can be done manually but an app might help someone set it up. Also access to blackboard and files in a mobile version for easy and fast access.
(This might be expanded to a university specific app that sets up a smart phone with mail, calendars, local bookmarks, reminders, etc. cf. Events and Calendar data on http://data.lincoln.ac.uk/documentation.html)
Fresher's App
This is a lot of work, but parts of it and prototypes might be possible in a weekend. Some relevant data is available on data.lincoln.ac.uk
What? Basic App designed to assist Fresher’s, returning students and external visitors to University or College.
Interfacing with campus and building maps and timetables to help Fresher’s and returning students find their way around in their first weeks in a new place. Integrate with GPS to navigate students to their lectures and seminars.
Why?
To aid our students on a major customer service level. It would reduce time spent at enquiry centres creating more efficiency throughout the institution.
Commercial prospects include marketing opportunities to increase funding through selling space on the information pages to publishers, books sellers, bars and clubs with offers and promotions.
The future? Locally, working with Blackboard, for other institutions working with their student information systems, event alerts from student union, reminders about surveys, assignment hand ins, social functions.
Include barcode functions to gain access to library services and catering loyalty promotions.
From a University wide perspective could be use for external events, conferences and public lecture to keep delegates informed on programme changes, locations and timings and deadlines.
Possible names: CampusAPP; cAPPmpus; CamMapApp
OUseful Lazyweb Requests
-- CourseDetective custom search engine styling. CourseDetective is a Google custom search developed at a JISC/CETIS hackday that searches over UK university course prospectus websites (About). The original hack just set up the bare bones custom search engine. It lacks styling, some of the index links may have may have rotted, and needs some nice widgety interfaces. If you can figure out how to use Google Analytics to track which search results are clicked on, that would be a benefit too...
-- OpenLearn Mindmaps Can you figure out a way of generating a mega mindmap that unpacks to provide a glimpse across the whole of the OU open education resources on OpenLearn derived from OU courses listed in the OU Linked Data course descriptions datastore
-- Campus Twitter Maps Something to get your ethics round... Using open data describing campus locations, can you build an openstreetmap interface to zoom in to any specified UK HE campus, and then maybe also add in view about campus twitter trends and social media groupings?
-- OU/BBC TV programmes (and trackbacks to that post) What can you build around OU TV programmes on iPlayer/OU/BBC programmes Linked Data?
Most Accessible / Inclusive
LNCD will award a £100 voucher bonus prize to the work that best demonstrates attention to accessibility and inclusivity.
The Guardian
£100 in amazon vouchers for best hack around "Social Inclusion in FE or HE". Ideas might include apps to help students from poorer backgrounds select a university based on living expense, tuition fees etc; A site to help students find jobs that wont interfere with their studies; A site to help prospective students find grants, bursaries or other helpful systems.
Cottage Labs
We have various projects up and running, we have some repos of code available to clone, and some issues on them we can give you details on. These projects are all open source projects to build useful tools for the community, and we will offer a job interview to anyone who can develop solutions to some of those issues over the weekend.
Note there are complexities, as we do not actually have employees - we are a partnership, so the definition of "job" is somewhat flexible... none of us at CL actually have jobs, but we have various fun projects to work on, all of which produce open source code that benefits higher education and research, and we would like to find more people to work with. If you are interested in this sort of work in future, or even if you don't want to do this challenge, just find us at the event to talk more about the pros and cons of this lifestyle.
Here is an issue (note, issue does not mean it is a hard problem, just that it is something that needs doing):
Issues: https://github.com/okfn/bibserver/issues/129 Repo address: https://github.com/okfn/bibserver/
Solving this would require cloning the bibserver repo, installing it, seeing how it works, and performing the necessary edits to the code, and showing that it works on your install. (I have added hints in a comment, and install instructions are on the repo).
Alternatively, people will need to get their data into a bibserver by parsing it from whatever format they currently have. Where do you currently manage your bibliographic references for your course work? What format are they in? Can you find a format that you or your friends use, and write a parser from that format into bibjson?
bibjson is detailed here - http://bibserver.okfn.org/bibjson/specs - see the v0.81 example. It is quite new, and is just JSON with keys from bibtex and the use of certain JSON objects for identifiers and links, and lists for author and editor and some more. The exemplar bibtex parser can be seen in the bibserver repo at https://github.com/okfn/bibserver/blob/master/bibserver/parsers/BibTexParser.py (ignore the big long conversion list at the end...)
