South Yorkshire Digital Alliance Hackathon

By Dr Paul Parry (School of Computing and Digital Technologies), and member of the SYDA.

January 28th saw SHU host the first South Yorkshire Digital Alliance (SYDA) Hackathon. The SYDA is a collaboration between the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, the South Yorkshire local authorities, South Yorkshire Police and Sheffield Hallam University. The focus is on technology and knowledge sharing, and applications of artificial intelligence and IT to solving real world problems faced by the partner organisations.

The first Hackathon invited 60 software developers from the respective organisations to build prototypes to tackle the triaging of anti-social behaviour reports. This is something that consumes a large amount of local authority time (and money). Developers worked in small teams, each bringing their own ideas and experience to construct working systems that demonstrated how the reporting of handling of anti-social behaviour could be made more efficient.

Participants thought the day was extremely useful, thought provoking and brought about a sense of team work – working with counterpart developers from the respective organisations to solve shared problems.

The day finished on an exciting high with a show and tell, where the various teams presented their prototypes. The longer-term aim is to hold more hackathons, each having a different theme but each ultimately having relevance to the day to day lives of residents and business in South Yorkshire.