Culture Code was a 24 hour hack event (actually 23... hello British Summer Time!) produced by Codeworks to bring cultural organisations with data sets together with data-hungry geeks and allow some magic to happen.

We decided to steer towards somewhere atypical- to take some data and try to engage, inform, and tell a story... or maybe two stories at the same time?

'Hope' was the result.

We could only begin to scratch the surface within the hack, and there are a few things that are only partly built and are currently disabled - we envisaged the user receiving messages from Hope or her friends, notifications and maybe friend invites.

There are things we would like to improve: Developing the games into something more engaging, fixing the pacing, building triggers so you have to visit a game's page before moving on. There's also quite a bit of stuff you can't click that we could do something with, and the game integration could be tighter

We'd be interested in making it more interactive - perhaps you could comment on Hope's status updates and we could collate everyone's input? More social network integration could be interesting- to also explore a story evolving through Twitter, for example.

Ultimately, we were very interested in the idea of having the environment decay completely and have Hope evolve into a real human being by the end of the feed - for her to start as an avatar and connect into emotional reality.

It would also be lovely to have the user end up on a 'real' Facebook profile.

We've tidied up some of the interface post-hack, but the core remains the same.

There are many potential ways to push this project if we can gather interest and support.

• Poverty data for Newcastle neighbourhood schools
• Image media from Children North East
• Headline statistics
• Dialogue from user stories and theatrical work generated from this

• Currently tested on the latest version of Google Chrome and Firefox. May misbehave on earlier versions, and Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, etc.
• Lightbox for images sometimes misbehaves first time round
• Hidden updates break occasionally, fixed by a page reload. Maybe when the user clicks on a thumbnail picture?
• iPhone: doesn't work on iPhone 2G, possibly also more recent revisions?
• iPhone/iPad: The games are written in Flash, and will not run on these devices.
• Devices without cursor keys will not be able to play some games.
• Some stats data that was being pulled live has had to be precompiled.
• Some images (e.g. decayed background) take time to load in, and reduce the impact.

• The organisers of the Culture Code hack: Codeworks (esp. Joeli and Herb), Tyneside cinema (Mark and staff), Arts Council (Lara), and everyone who helped it run smoothly (Data Ambassadors, Staff)
• The originators, contributors, and stars of the original Hope theatrical project, including Live Theatre's Youth Theatre and Helix Arts
• The suppliers of our data (Children North East, .gov.uk)
• The journalistic element (Christian, John, Martin, and the misc and many Twitfellows)
• All the cultural organisations, artsnerds and datageeks who made the event so much fun.

• Culture Code (Storify) by Documentally
• NCJ Media report on Culture Hack (John Hill)
• The Blackboard (Documentally)
• Amy and Jeremiah surf the blackboard (Photo- Martin Cunningham)
• Documentally interviewing James (Photo- Martin Cunningham)
• Coding Hope (Audio- Documentally)
• The start of Hope presentation (Video- Documentally)
• The presentation (Photo- Martin Cunningham)
• The presentation (Photo- Martin Cunningham)
• The presentation/Povertyville (Photo- Janet Davis)
• 'Team Hope' wins Culture Code hack, feat. a super tired James Rutherford (Audio- Documentally)
• Poverty Statistics Map (gov.uk)

Please let us know if you have some more!