MY-GI

MY-GI is a unique and personal mobile application to create ‘your own Glasgow International’, created at Culture Hack Scotland 2012.

Data used: the then current (it was on at the same time as CHSCOT) listings of events and programme of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (GI).

What’s ace about your hack?

Not sure about ace, but its a simple and useful hack that takes standard listing data and allows the user to make more use of it in several ways. At one end of the spectrum it uses geo-data to help attendees navigate a festival distributed across many venues throughout a city. At the other end it enables the programming of personal event listings — a personalised and user-curated version of Glasgow International which people can share with friends, and also use to put on their own events, with the festival as a basis.

Tell us the starting point for it?

We were floating a few ideas and there were three or four that stayed in the running till the end of the first day. In retrospect we chose too late to make the most of the time to develop the hack. We opted for My-Gi in the end (‘uncreative scotland’ will have to wait for another day) as we’d had recent experience of the festival and felt that this would be a useful and practical tool, as well as examining aspects of participation in the festival by allowing users to programme events etc.

What information or prior knowledge did you have about the arts organisation and the data set, and did it influence your approach?

The knowledge we had of GI probably influenced our decision to run with this idea. We hadn’t inspected any of the data sets in any detail prior to the hack weekend, and in retrospect, this too would be a good thing to do when taking part in a future event.

What tech/programming languages/platforms did you use and how do they make it work?

The prototype uses some very (and we mean very) basic html. The ‘real’ app would initially be prototyped as a responsive browser-based web app for phone, tablet and PC, using HTML5, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL. If that took off, we’d look at building native apps for Android and iPhone, to make better use of geolocation and other features of the mobile devices.

Describe the process of development and your team.

The process of development involved an initial brainstorm of ideas, and then the quite difficult phase of trying to decide on a project to run with. Once decided we tried to quickly sketch out some user scenarios. David cleaned up the data, which in itself took a while, and we then tried to visualise the various stages required to demonstrate the concept. The visual look and feel of the app is currently in the vein of existing GI material so it was quite quick to apply this to the different screens. As a team that likes sleep and isn’t afraid to admit it, its worth noting that we didn’t stay up all night.

Any developments following CHSCOT?

Not yet, but it’s on the to-do list.

What was your Culture Hack Scotland highlight or light bulb moment?

Team Roy Mohan-Shearer and the twitching skinny-jeans listings ‘device’. By his own admission a one-liner, but a very very good one-liner at that.