Leeds City Council - Hack for Good

Situation
Every year Leeds City Council run a Hack for Good. The Leeds City Council Hack for Good event is powered by AWS with support from Ingenuity, Nexus (University of Leeds), dxw, Urban Foresight and the ICO’s Innovation Hub.

This Hackathon calls for thinkers and doers of all backgrounds and skill levels to participate in co-designing ethical and innovative solutions.

Let your ideas know no bounds to help create insights and solutions through better use of data and technology.

Task
As part of a multi-disciplinary team from Axiologik, I worked on the problem statement 'How do we identify the future skills needs of the Leeds workforce and ensure that job opportunities are open, accessible and inclusive for everyone?'.

Action
Research: Analysing existing data, speaking with SMEs and researching local issues we were able to understand the user groups, create personas, visualise and prioritise pain points on a matrix that highlighted areas for potential new and innovative ideas to be formed.

Problem Framing: We then framed the problems that need to be addressed using a problem framing canvas.

Ideas: We created ideas using the crazy 8s method before aligning on a direction and idea to take forward, basing the ideas on feasibility and validity as well as the needs and pains that would be addressed across our personas.

Technical Landscape: Using our Amazon SMEs, we explored the possible back end systems, software and services that would be required to bring our idea to life, mapping out the architecture and governance required to bring the idea to life.

Result
Presentation: We produced and presented our hack process and idea back to the other teams and judges, winning our problem statement area with Leeds City Council asking us to work with them to make the idea become a reality.