#DfTHacks

On March 24th 2017, 80 people gathered in the Crowne Plaza London to hear 12 exceptional pitches from 60 sleep deprived yet surprisingly exuberant hackers, hustlers, designers and entrepreneurs.

This was the conclusion of the Department for Transport sponsored hackathon that saw participants from all over Europe creating innovative solutions and opportunities from the various transport datasets provided by the sponsors that included road, rail, cycling, shipping, flights and buses.

The weekend kicked off in London with short speeches from senior industry individuals, including a Director General and the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport.

Then it was over to the always impressive team at Hack Partners to wrangle the participants into teams through a series of ice breakers and ad-hoc pitching for a non-stop weekend that saw everyone working in the Trainline headquarters in London, followed by 24 hours in Reading at the bus depot with return journeys courtesy of the CEO and Head of Engineering at Reading Buses – they drove!

The final pitching event saw many exciting propositions with a few absolute standout opportunities that could almost immediately be put into practice for the benefit of travellers and transport operators – watch this space for Query, Deep Blue Sea and Bond!

Huge congratulations to Tom Ewing and the Department for Transport for enabling a government body to engage with individuals outside of Westminster who genuinely solved complex problems and created future opportunities for the industry. Hopefully this initiative will pave the way for more public collaborations in the future.

As always, a big round of applause for the team at Hack Partners for pulling off another incredibly impressive transport themed event.

Thanks for having me as a judge!

Iain Wallace

Head of Innovation Partnerships, BAE Systems

Check out the recently published video