The Challenge

Tourism is vital to the local economy. While loads of tourists pass through Aberdeen we could do so much more to make it a destination of choice.

The featured image above is how we used to attract tourists to Aberdeen. How should we do it now? What role does design, marketing, technology or data play in new interactions with tourists?

Who should attend?

Anyone – despite our name, coding is a small bit of what we do.

Of course, coders, data wranglers, designers and other techies are important to a hack weekend.

We’d be delighted to see you if:

• You work in the tourism sector, operating attractions, providing accomodation or other services
• You have identified a problem with service delivery, or see an opportunity to do things better!
• You have an interesting in service design
• You work or study in the creative industries
• You have experience as a tourist in Aberdeen or anywhere else
• You are someone who wants to do more with data but isn’t sure where to start
• You are a student (of any discipline)
• You are someone who wants to improve the local area, or use digital and skills to improve local services
• You are from the third sector or local government
• You work with mapping, GIS, or location data
• You are curious about learning new techniques and skills to use in your day job, and finally
• And, of course, if you are a developer, designer, UX expert, data wrangler, coders, or service designer

So it's a Toursim hack?

Yes - we'll be identifying opportunities and barriers to making Aberdeen City and Shire a destination of choice for tourists, creating projects, teams and prototypes to address those.

Timings

The event will run Saturday 9.30am to about 5pm, then Sunday 9.30 to about 4.30pm.

What happens over the weekend?

* identification of opportunities and barriers

* ideation to address those

* creation of project teams to work on those

* agile prototyping of solutions, so that by close of play Sunday we will have demonstrable solutions which could be developed into real worls products or services.

But, a ticket will cost £5 (*)

What do you mean, it's not free? CTC is usually free!

At CTC 11 in December we broke with a tradition established over the previous 10 events and charged a small amount to attend. The reasone was that in a couple of recent CTC events we had higher than normal numbers of people booking free tickets and not showing up. That meant we over-catered, and despite our best efforts we had left-over food, which is a bad thing and wastes money too.

So, we attached a monetary value to the ticket (* backed up by our promise that those attending would get their money back when they showed up). And it worked. The bookings didn't go down. Fewer people dropped out. We didn't waste food and we banked the money that went unclaimed. A few generous individuals recognising our new charity status even refused their money back, which was nice.

Sponsorship

Robert Gordon University will be sponsoring this event. We could do with another sponosor or two to make sure we cover all costs. If you would like to sponsor it, get in touch with @codethecity on Twitter.

We look forward to seeing you in February!

Ian, Steve, Andrew and Bruce.

Code the City

Registered Charity in Scotland: SC047835