#yrs2010 = Young geeks + mentors + 1 week
August 2-6, across the UK.

About Us

The Project

The Brief

Using Open Government Data, create an application ("app") and/or website that uses the data in a new and imaginative way, making it easier for a user to get what they want from the set of data.

Problem we decided to solve

At our age, Universities are the hot topic. Should we, shouldn't we? Which course? Where to go? In this age of the web, the first place we look is the internet. To be honest though, the services available aren't great. There's no where that you can directly compare universities, and the sites that are available are a bit boring!

And so, we swiftly set out to create a University Comparison site that is visually exciting and gives you what you really want to know, but official statistics won't tell you, like information on night outs, along with standard fields (UCAS tariff, address).

Data we used

Our project incorporates a long list of data-sources, both governmental and non-governmental:

Government education (schools) API
Government police API
Commercial public houses API
Commercial nightclubs directory
Nearest train station provider (based on data.gov.uk data)
Commercial course directory

In this respect, it would have been a lot easier and the result improved if the 'Unistats' government portal had been more friendly to data retrieval. As it stand we have both legal and technical concerns about it.

The Team

We, part of the London based team for Young Rewired State 2010, are Dan, Marcus, Sufian, Harry and David. Summoned from the furthest reaches of the UK to complete a challenge so fiendishly difficult it would take a full arsenal of computer language skills. Luckily... that's our speciality!

Dan - The mastermind behind the whole idea, the Steve Jobs to our Apple, the Bill Gates to our Microsoft, the Jimmy Wales to our Wikipedia.
Marcus - Helped to make a similar but less comprehensive university searcher at a similar but shorter YRS event last year.
Sufian - The designer of the layout of the website. He makes it look pretty and consistent across pages.
Harry - Busy ferreting away with Marcus at the PHP database. Making sure there's something to search!
David - The liability... "I can write HTML... sort of"