I went along to Rewired State DotGovLabs this weekend with the intention of being a participant-observer to help with the exploratory phase of my MSc dissertation research. It’s the first full-blown hack-day event I’ve been too, so I’d given a lot of thought in advance to how to be a participant-observer in a way that fits in with good social scientific research and research ethics. In reality, being an observer of small groups furiously coding away, without getting the way, turned out to be a tricky task – so, thanks to the kind invitation of Chris Thorpe, I joined one of the small project groups and gained many more insights into the process of a government service focussed hack-day than I could from just watching different projects from the outside.
I’ve written up a few quick details of the project I was working on over on my personal blog - and am off now to start reviewing my research plan based on all the learning and exploratory findings from the last two days.
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[...] own learning about the process of how a hack-day happens will also feed into the Open Data Impacts project I’m currently undertaking for dissertation [...]