Manchester Digital Laboratory

Blimey, a year has flown by.  Last year, a 10-strong team of young coders, developers and designers took over MadLab as part of the Young Rewired State initiative.  This year, we will be there again – 1st – 5th August.

If you hadn’t heard, then YRS is:

…a week long hack event (1-5 August 2011) where young and aspiring web developers across the country build their own web apps, visualisations and projects using government data, mentored by great companies with visits from rockstar geeks.

Whizzkids from YRS 2010!

There are 12 YRS centres across the country this year – in 2010 we were one of four.  On the Friday, the team will travel down to London to meet the other and show and tell.  Last year, the “whizzkids” came away with prizes and kudos – no doubt this year will be the same…

We’d love the MadLab community to support emerging talent, so we’ve four calls to action:

1 – Tell a Young Person!

If you know someone under 18, who might be interested to take part, then point them to the YRS website to sign up.  With 12 centres, it could be there is a base closer to home, but we’d also welcome more participants at MadLab

2 – Open Up Some Data

YRS is all about building on open data.  We’ve data.gov.uk, but also the wonderful DataGM project.  If you’ve got a dataset, and no-one else can use it, then you know where to find us – hire the YRS team (OK, so I fudged that a bit too far)!

3 – Become a Mentor

MadLab is full of “rockstar geeks” - can you spare an hour/morning/afternoon/week mentor the YRS’ers?  It could just be you can help turn a developing app into a great app…

4 – Feed the Kids!

We really need pizza.  Al donations gratefully received.  In return, I understand there will be HTML 5 spinning pizza wheels.

YRS is a great initiative – and for the third year running Manchester is a major contributor.  Drop us a line on @youngrewired, or via @stevieflow if you can help in anyway… and follow #yrs2011